life. These farmers — these killers — were fools not to do so. And now, God the merciful is taking them, in his infinite wisdom.
Shala. Enver’s own family had been toiling over their own land. It was an unremarkable day, just like this one. Daily life was in the details: a bit of thirst, a blister, a bad joke half-heard, a stubborn root. The Serbs came in uniforms, walking slowly. They were in no rush. They were on government business. To terrorise them. To drive them out like rodents from the garden of Eden.
Enver’s family was surrounded.
His sister was raped. Her ears were cut off. One eye was gouged out. She was left to live like this. Enver was just a boy, hiding alone in a closet as he listened to the screams of his sister outside, too scared to try to stop it. He heard it all. As he entered the kitchen to see what had happened, he heard someone laughing. To this day, he is sure it was the Devil.
And now, years on, here they were, the killers. The torturers. The families of these people had been sipping water from flasks, and their women were serving them cold beer in the middle of the noon-day heat to soothe them. These murderers. These parasites. Acting as though they, too, knew human emotion. But they were empty. Soulless. Without remorse or faith.
Past the wounded boy, Enver broke into a run and ran into the front room of the farm house. The water from the tap was still running. Outside he heard the pop-pop-pop of low-calibre rifles and a few muffled yells. But inside it was so quiet.
Even an empty house speaks more than this. You can hear an empty house breathe. This one was holding its breath.
He put down the rake and took a thick knife from the sink. He tried to control the beating of his heart.
‘Come out. Face your fate,’ he called out.
He walked into the living room. The television was on, playing a Western film dubbed into Serbian. A black American cop with a gun was running down a city street after a robber. The city was New York. The robber was clutching a bright-red handbag and sprinting between a line of cars.
‘Come out!’ Enver yelled. And perhaps his voice was scary enough, because there was a muffled cry in the closet.
Prepared for his last breath, he opened the closet door and looked into the darkness.
Outside, the killing was steady and without mercy. The iron circle enclosed around the farm, as the others had done to his own village. Snipers covered three directions, ensuring that no one escaped the shrinking perimeter.
It took time for his eyes to adjust to the dull grey and flecks of gold in the closet. But when they did, it was as though God himself had placed them there for him.
There was a woman in her early twenties, wearing a flower skirt and no shoes. And beside her, nestled into her sister’s nape, was a soft little one. Maybe twelve years old.
It was clearly a gift. A chance to have his revenge but assert his moral superiority, all in the same simple gesture. There was such purity to the offering, its cosmic balance almost made him cry.
He addressed the older one.
‘Get out. Get on your hands and knees, and prepare yourself for me. Otherwise I will slit her throat and have you anyway.’
He remembers the feel of her hips in his hands, the movement of the flower skirt across her back, the whimpers of fear, pain, and pleasure confusing her. And when the moment came, he raised his face to the heavens and — unsure if his act was profane — shouted that God is truly great.
It was over. And yet these moments do not merely end. They do not pass unremarked and drift lightly into the hinterlands of memory to be eclipsed — like so much else — by the present and its seductions of imagined futures. Sometimes, they live. And they grow. And the past matures until it takes over the world and gives birth to a new reality that commands us and subjugates us, making us face who we are and all we have done. And so, when Enver learned that this girl, Senka, had become pregnant and had fled to the Nordic countries to hide her shame, he was unprepared for the feelings that came over him, and the bright light that shone down on it all — directly from above — casting no shadows in which to hide from this new world of his own making.
Now Enver was a father.
He opens his eyes in the car, and realises he has nodded off like some old man. He looks again, in vain, for a cigarette to place in the crook of his finger and the corner of his lips, where it belongs. He wipes his face with a tissue that leaves bits of white on his temple and that snags on his glasses.
The couple in the hotel sign some paper and stand to leave. Enver shakes his head in bemusement. The mailbox to the apartment where he and Senka had words yesterday showed that these two people lived together. If they have been together for so long as to share a mailbox — married, perhaps — how could they have so much to talk about? Does this man have no friends to confide in that he will chat with this girl for company?
It is such a strange place, this Norway. Such strange people.
The CD in the car ends, and he turns on the radio. He checks his mobile phone for messages, but there are none. The radio begins to play old American rock and roll from the 1950s, and he leaves it on. He fiddles with the rear-view mirror and wonders when he’ll have some time to eat today. He’d forgotten to eat breakfast, and now that he is tailing these two to find the old man — the one Kadri saw in the alley — he just can’t see when he’ll get something to eat.
Maybe an ice-cream. There might be a chance for an ice-cream. That would be delicious. Maybe strawberry. Or mint. They have good mint here. And a cone. Or a cup.
No, a cone.
There is a 7-Eleven in sight. They have ice-cream. Not especially good ice-cream, though. So perhaps not. But they do have the
Which is too much time. Such is his fate, they are coming out of the hotel now, carrying two unusual pieces of hard-cased luggage. They are wearing leather jackets, and carrying helmets. They walk around the corner, still in sight, and mount a large off-road motorcycle that immediately makes Enver worry. It is very hard to tail people on motorcycles. Even when they don’t know they are being followed, they can weave through cars in traffic, advance to the front of queues at red lights, and take sudden turns onto roads that disappear through forests.
The Norwegian places a call on his mobile phone, speaks for only a moment, and then puts it back in his jacket.
The white Mercedes will be conspicuous. No one drives a white Mercedes here. His friends bought it for him. Stupid. You leave it to a bunch of foreigners, and they inevitably bring their own ideas with them.
The correct answer to the problem would have been an Audi A6 estate car, in silver. That would have been the least suspicious car for him to use in Oslo. Schools of them swim through the city. He could have been in any of them, but he isn’t. He is in a gangster’s white Mercedes, with no air conditioning and one CD, following a BMW motorcycle now pulling away onto the road, heading east.
He starts the CD again. Despite himself, Enver smiles.
At least the hunt has begun.
Chapter 7
The BMW GS 1200 runs high on the road, and the boxster engine thumps gently. Rhea looks over Lars’s right shoulder as the bike glides undramatically at sixty-five kilometres an hour past the new Opera, which is shimmering white and angular against the blue fjord, as Oslo’s city centre disappears behind her.
She unzips the vents on her leather jacket to let in some more warm air.
