Eva Karin wants to die, and she has one of her father’s razor blades in her bag.
A boy is coming towards her through the trees. Not along the track, like her. He appears from the side, she turns away, no one must see her tears, and certainly not now, not when she is about to die. Eva Karin increases her speed.
Suddenly, he is standing in front of her.
He is smiling.
He is more of a man than a boy, she sees now, and his hair is unkempt. It can’t have been cut for ages, and she recoils.
‘Do not be afraid,’ he says, holding out his arms with the palms facing her. ‘I only want to talk to you.’
When he extends one hand towards her, she takes it.
She doesn’t know why, but she takes the stranger’s hand and goes with him into the forest. They walk among the trees, wading through the wood anemones to a little glade warmed by the sun. He sits down with his back resting against a tree trunk, and gently pats the ground beside him.
The man is wearing American blue jeans and a white collarless shirt. His feet are bare apart from a pair of sandals like the ones her father has; they never come out of the wardrobe until the summer holidays. The stranger speaks with a Bergen accent, but he is not like anyone she has ever met.
Eva Karin sits down. The sun pours its warmth over her, and the light is intense. She screws up her eyes as she looks at the sky.
‘You are not to do this,’ says the man with the ice-blue eyes.
‘I have to,’ says Eva Karin.
‘You are not to do this,’ he repeats, opening her bag.
She allows a strange man to open her bag and take out the razor blade, which she had tucked into a tear in the lining. He places it on top of a scar on his hand, then closes his hand.
‘Look,’ he says with a smile, slowly opening his hand with the palm upwards.
The razor blade has disappeared.
His laughter comes from all around, it is the soughing of the wind and the song of the birds. He laughs until she cannot help smiling, and when he sees her smile he claps his hands softly.
‘I love my magic tricks,’ he says.
Eva Karin rests. Almost summer.
‘Life is sacred,’ the man says. ‘You must never forget that.’
‘Not mine,’ she says with her eyes closed. ‘I am… a sinner.’
She hesitates before using such a word. It is too high-flown. It feels wrong in her mouth, it is too big and grown-up and she is only sixteen years old.
‘We are all sinners,’ he says in a casual tone of voice. ‘But I don’t want the entire population of the city running around trying to kill themselves for that reason.’
‘I… I love another girl.’
Once again a word that is too big for her. ‘Love’ is a word for the darkness, a word to be whispered, almost inaudibly.
‘And the greatest of these is love,’ he smiles, and all around them the forest begins to laugh again. ‘When I think about it, I have never said anything more true.’
His hand brushes against her knee. It is heavy and light at the same time. Warm and cold, and something else for which she does not have the words.
‘You must listen to me,’ he says, suddenly serious. ‘Not to all those who think they know me.’
‘I’ve read and read,’ Eva Karin whispers. ‘But I cannot find any comfort.’
‘Listen to what I say. Not to the things people say I have said.’
He gets on his knees and turns to face her. His head hides the sun, and becomes a black silhouette surrounded by a light so strong that Eva Karin cannot look. Once again she feels that heavy lightness in his hands as he clasps them around hers.
‘I am not harsh, Eva Karin. Admittedly, my father can be a little strange and thunderous from time to time, but I myself have experienced too much to sit in judgement on love.’
She cannot see him, but she can hear his smile.
‘It is evil I condemn. Darkness. Never light and love.’
‘But I-’
‘Be true to yourself, and true to me.’
‘How shall I-?’
‘I don’t give prescriptions for life, Eva Karin. But you will find a solution. And if you should stumble and fall, if you should have doubts and be afraid, then all you have to do is speak to me. I have been listening to you for a while, you see. I just had to wait for the right moment.’
He stands up and takes a step to the side. The warmth of the sun once again pours over Eva Karin. Shading her eyes with her right hand, she looks up.
‘Do not fail your own ability to love,’ he says, beginning to move away. ‘And above all: do not judge your own life according to the standards of others.’
Halfway across the little glade he turns to her once more.
‘There is only one thing that you must hold sacred and inviolate,’ he says. ‘And that is life itself.’
‘Life itself,’ she whispers, and he is gone.
But he never left her.
Author’s Afterword
This book is a novel, and is therefore not true. To be a writer is to lie, to make things up, to invent. This means that you can describe a cellar at the Hotel Continental, for example, without even knowing whether or not it exists. I know nothing about the hotel’s air-conditioning system, nor do I know whether the hotel has a system of CCTV cameras which is out of date. I hope I am forgiven for using the building as part of the backdrop for my story; it’s just so perfect.
What is true, however, is that in many countries there are a number of groups united in particular by their hatred and contempt for certain sections of society. It is also true that some of these groups are fairly systematic in their use of violence against the people they hate. Some of them have demonstrably perpetrated the most serious crimes in order to finance their macabre projects. It is also true, unfortunately, that murder and acts of terrorism have been carried out in the name of various gods all over the world since time immemorial. All the hate groups mentioned in this novel actually exist, with the exception of The 25’ers.
APLC does not exist. It is, however, modelled on the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. Their homepage (www.splcenter.org) with its links and suggestions for further reading has been extremely helpful in my work on this book.
Thanks also to Mariann Aalmo Fredin for valuable help along the way; to Berit Reiss-Andersen for everything she knows about the law, which I have long forgotten; and to my brother Even Holt, who always has piquant medical refinements to offer. A big thank you also to Kari Michelsen, who in May 2008 at a beach bar in France persuaded me to abandon a project which had been under way for a long time and to write this book instead.
Finally, a loving thank you to Picasso. She warms my feet while I write, forces me out in sunshine or rain, and gives me wholly undeserved, unconditional devotion.
ANNE HOLT
Nydalen, Oslo 2009
