stallholders Lilian’s photograph but none of them recognized her. I wondered if they would have recognized their own mothers. Everybody looked slightly dazed.
Anna spotted a bar. ‘As you said, she had to eat and drink …’
We went in. The big airy room was full of guys with wispy beards and woolly hats with earflaps. It was us who looked weird. We did what any concerned family member would do. We went up to the bar and held out Lilian’s picture. The girl had pierced eyebrows and a nose-ring. Her hair was bleached.
‘Have you seen this girl?’
‘I’m sorry, no.’
‘Do you mind if we ask your customers?’
‘Be my guest. But please buy something.’
I ordered a couple of beers and handed over a fistful of kroner. We left the bottles on the bar and started to circulate. The first table responded to the photo with shakes of the head. So did the next. People did look, but I got the feeling they wouldn’t have told us even if they had seen her. I put it down to rage against the machine. ‘This is shit, Anna. Let’s try that information centre.’
As we turned to leave, a ruddy-faced man in his sixties hauled himself to his feet, as if to follow us out. Then he seemed to think better of it and sat down again. Maybe he was just too stoned or pissed. He had long white hair that needed even more of a wash than we did and a beard that Gandalf would have been jealous of.
I caught Anna’s eye and we headed back to his table. She sat opposite him, and I stood alongside. He concentrated very hard on his glass. Everything about him suggested he’d downed a good few whiskies before he’d got to this one.
He nodded at the pictures. His watery eyes seemed to loosen in their sockets. ‘Your … child?’
‘No, my sister. She’s run away. She came here, maybe ten days ago. You’ve seen her?’
He pulled out a packet of Drum and some papers but seemed in no hurry to open them. Anna took the hint and pulled out her readymades. He feigned delighted surprise and helped himself to three.
‘You know, many people say that this place saved them when they were at their lowest ebb and had nowhere else to turn.’ His English was accented but faultless. ‘I’m one of them. I left home when I was fifteen and drifted until I found Christiania.’
He paused to light the first of his recently acquired Camels and sucked in the real deal with the kind of pleasure that only smokers know. Me, I wished we were still in the EU where this shit was outlawed. Anna sparked up too, adding to the pollution.
Gandalf waved his free hand around the commune as if it were his kingdom. ‘In the early days we built our own houses in the woods or renovated the old barracks. We had a right to build as we chose. This place is all I know.’
I wasn’t sure if the smile that lurked behind the hair was fuelled by happiness or cannabis, but it showed off the three or four yellow tombstones that still clung to his gums in all their glory.
I stuck a finger on Lilian’s chin. ‘Her name is Lilian Nemova. You seen her?’
‘Russian?’
‘Moldovan.’
His eyes wobbled as they moved down her picture once more, but only for a fleeting second. ‘You do not sound like a Moldovan, brother.’
Anna was getting as pissed off with him as I was. ‘He’s helping me find her.’
He took a swig from his glass.
I kept an eye on people coming in and leaving the bar. You never knew.
‘We were hard-working people here. Artists, socialists, anarchists - people who drank and smoked too much, but we had rules. We have bad people preying on the weak and lonely.’ He waved in the vague direction of the free town outside. ‘It was the dawn of a new era. A new way of living. Then it all changed. We’ve even had a murder here - here, in Christiania!’ He pointed a wrinkled finger at the sugar bowl in front of him like it was the root of all evil. ‘It’s wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.’
He necked the last of his drink.
‘But have you seen her?’
He shook his head; he didn’t want to look at the photo again. ‘These are sad days. Turkish gangs, Palestinian and Balkan gangs, Russian gangs. They are all here.’
I crouched down, elbows on the table, trying for eye-to-eye. ‘One of the gangs - the Russians maybe - would they have her?’
He stared into his empty glass and kept shaking his head. He started to cry. Saliva dribbled into his beard.
‘Fuck him. Let’s get out there. The more people we hit, the better the chance that whoever lifted her will front us.’
Anna wasn’t too sure. ‘You think that would be the best thing to do? We might get very dead, very soon.’
‘Got a better idea? People aren’t exactly falling over themselves to help us, are they? We could be here for days waiting for this twat to get sober.’
5
Back on the street, I studied my map. ‘That way.’
There were no signs to tell us we’d arrived, but it wasn’t long before we found ourselves on Pusher Street. It was like we’d crossed the border between the fairy kingdom and the land of the trolls. The atmosphere changed abruptly. These were mean streets. Cannabis fumes hung more heavily in the air. Aggressive-looking skinheads, some hooded, stood round flaming metal barrels, furtive and menacing. I watched a young guy approach one group and be steered down an alley. Their job seemed to be to direct buyers and keep an eye out for police.
Everywhere I looked, pit-bull terriers wandered unleashed.
‘It’s an old Russian trick.’ Anna nodded at a dog that should have had tattoos on its front legs. ‘They’re trained to whisk the stash away from a police raid.’
Large canvas parasols covered makeshift stalls. I stepped under one and eyed the merchandise. Lumps of cannabis and bags of skunk were displayed on a tree trunk and a wooden barrel. I showed the stallholder Lilian’s picture and asked in English if he’d seen her. He was about her age. He was dressed in grimy old German Army gear that hadn’t been washed since Stalingrad.
As he started to answer, a skinhead with a black sweatshirt strode over from one of the braziers. ‘
My anxious sister clasped my arm and guided me away.
I tried my best to look scared, and part of me was. ‘If she’s shacked up with one of those arseholes, Anna, we could have a problem.’
6
There were hundreds of buildings in Christiania and Lilian could have been holed up in any or none of them. Almost all the businesses, shops and restaurants were located in Christiania City. A network of footpaths and bridges connected the sprawling residential sectors. North of where we were, the town gradually gave way to woods.
The main barracks had been converted into an apartment building called the Ark of Peace. It was the largest halftimbered house in northern Europe, and housed more than eighty people. Then there were another eighty-five acres of old army buildings, run-down trailers and modern self-build wood and brick cottages. Even if everyone was
