car parked on the street so that the garage door wouldn’t wake anyone.
The drive did him good. While his mother had always adored the light, Lukas was a man who felt comfortable at night. As a child he had always felt safe in the dark. The night was his friend, and had been ever since he was little and lived in the big house on Nubbebakken. From the age of six or seven he had often woken up and been fascinated by the shadows dancing on his bedroom wall. The big oak tree whose branches scraped against the window pane was illuminated from behind by a single yellow street lamp, making the most beautiful patterns on his bed. All of a sudden, when he could no longer sleep, he would tiptoe out of his room and up the steep stairs leading to the attic. In the semi-darkness, among trunks and old furniture, moth-eaten clothes and toys that were so old nobody knew who had owned them originally, he could sit for hours, lost in dreams.
Lukas Lysgaard drove from Os through the damp winter darkness into a Bergen that was heavy with sleep; he had finally made a decision.
When he thought back to his own childhood, he didn’t have much to complain about.
He was a much-loved child, and he knew it. His parents’ faith had been good for him when he was little. He accepted their God just as easily as all children accept their parents’ ideals until they are old enough to rebel. His rebellion had taken place in silence. From seeing the Lord as a comforting father figure – forgiving, watchful and omnipresent – he had begun to have his doubts at the age of twelve.
There was no room for doubt in the house on Nubbebakken.
His mother’s faith in God had been absolute. Her kindness towards others, regardless of their faith or conviction, her generosity and tolerance towards even the weakest among the fallen, all of this was firmly anchored in her certainty that the Redeemer was the Son of God. When Lukas became a teenager he discovered that his mother wasn’t a believer. She knew. Eva Karin Lysgaard was absolutely sure about her religion, and he never dared confront her with his own doubts. God stopped answering his prayers. Christianity became more and more of a closed book to him, and he started to seek the answers to the mysteries of life elsewhere.
After completing his military service he began to study physics, and abandoned his religion. Still without saying a word. He and Astrid had been married in church – what else would they do? Their children had been baptized. He was pleased about that now; his mother had been so happy each time she held up one of her grandchildren before the congregation, after administering the sacrament herself.
It had always been different at home with his parents, he thought, as he drew closer to his father’s house.
When he was a boy he had never noticed it. Since his mother’s death he had been trying to remember when it first arose, this vague feeling that she was hiding something. Perhaps it had happened gradually, alongside his own dwindling faith. Although she had always been there as a mother, always spiritually and often physically, as he grew older it had become increasingly clear to him that he was sharing her with someone else. It was like a shadow hanging over her. Something missing.
He had a sister. That must be the answer.
It was difficult to work out how and why, but it had to be connected in some way to his mother’s salvation as a sixteen-year-old. Perhaps she had been pregnant. Perhaps Jesus had spoken to her when she was thinking of having an abortion. That would explain the one area in which she was immovable and sometimes almost fanatical: it was not given to man to end a life created by God.
He quickly worked out that his mother had been sixteen in 1962.
It wasn’t easy to be pregnant and unmarried in 1962, and most definitely not for a young girl.
The woman in the photo was so like him; he remembered that, despite the fact that on the few occasions when he had paid any real attention to the picture he had felt an antipathy, almost a sense of loathing towards this nameless woman with the attractive, slightly crooked teeth.
Lukas was going to find that photograph. Then he was going to find his sister.
On Nubbebakken he parked a short distance from his father’s house. When he reached the front door, he tried not to rattle the bunch of keys.
Once inside, he stopped and listened.
It was never really silent in his parents’ house. The wood creaked, the hinges squealed. Branches scraped against the window panes when it was breezy. The ticking of the grandfather clock was usually so loud that you could hear it more or less anywhere on the ground floor. The pipes sighed at irregular intervals; his childhood home had always been a living house. The floors were old, and he still remembered where to put his feet so that he wouldn’t wake anyone.
Now everything was dead.
There wasn’t a breath of wind outside, and even when he stood on a floorboard that usually protested beneath his weight, he could hear nothing but his own pulse beating against his eardrums.
He walked towards the narrow staircase, holding his breath until he reached the top. The door of his father’s bedroom was ajar. The slow, regular breathing indicated that he was asleep. Lukas moved cautiously over to the door leading up to the attic. As usual the old wrought-iron key was in the lock, and he lifted the handle up and towards him while turning the key at the same time, which he knew was the trick. The click as the door unlocked made him hold his breath once more.
His father was still asleep.
With infinite slowness he opened the door.
Eventually he was able to slip through.
He placed his feet as close to the wall as possible on each step, as he had learned to do when he was only six years old. Silently he made his way up to the big, dusty room. He slipped the torch out of his waistband and began to search.
It was a reunion with his own childhood.
In the boxes piled up by the little round window in one gable he found clothes and shoes that had belonged to him when he was a little boy. Next to them were several boxes containing more clothes; his mother had thrown nothing away. He tried to remember when he had last been up here, and worked out that it must have been before they moved away for the first time, when he was twelve, and he had cried himself to sleep for two months at the thought of leaving Bergen.
And yet everything seemed so strangely familiar.
The smell was still the same. Dust, mothballs and rusty metal mixed with shoe polish and indefinable, comforting scents.
Suddenly he turned away from the boxes by the window and moved silently back to the staircase. He swept the beam of the torch over the floor at the top of the stairs. In the thick dust he could clearly see his own footprints. He could also see another impression, with no pattern on the sole, like the marks left by slippers. There were several when he looked more closely, and they went in both directions. Someone had been here recently.
Lukas couldn’t help smiling. His father had always thought the attic was a safe place. Every Christmas Eve when he was a little boy, Lukas had pretended to be surprised at his presents. His father had hidden them up here until Christmas Eve, but he had no idea that Lukas had become an expert at opening presents and sealing them up again without anyone being able to tell.
He stretched and looked around.
The attic was large, covering the same area as the ground floor of the house. A hundred square metres, if he remembered rightly. His courage almost failed at the thought of how long it would take to search through all this rubbish – all these memories – for something as small as a photograph.
Once again the beam of the torch danced across the footprints by the stairs.
The impressions left by the slippers- almost invisible – were pointing in the opposite direction from where Lukas had been. They led over to the western end of the attic, where the little window was nailed shut. He traced them carefully.
A sound from downstairs made him stiffen.
The sound of footsteps. The footsteps stopped.
Lukas held his breath.
His father was awake. He could almost hear him breathing, even though there must be more than fifteen metres between them. It sounded as if he was standing by the attic door.
Shit. Lukas’s lips silently formed the word. He hadn’t closed the door, simply because he was afraid of making
