Blood on Snow

Chapter 17

It was light. Light and cosy. Mum explained that I had a high temperature, and that the doctor who had been there said I had to stay in bed for a few days and drink a lot of water, but that there was nothing to worry about. That’s when I could tell she was concerned. But I wasn’t scared. I was fine. Even when I closed my eyes it was light, it was shining through my eyelids, a warm red glow. I had been put in Mum’s big bed, and it felt as if all the seasons were passing through the room. Mild spring turning into scalding hot summer, with sweat running like summer rain from my forehead onto sheets that stuck to my thighs, then at last the relief of autumn, with clear air, clear senses. Until it was suddenly winter again, with chattering teeth and a long drift through sleep, dream and reality.

She had been to the library and taken out a book for me. Les Misérables. Victor Hugo. “Concise edition,” it said on the cover, under a drawing of Cosette as a young girl, the original illustration by Émile Bayard.

I read, and dreamed. Dreamed and read. Added and cut scenes. In the end I wasn’t sure how much the author had come up with, and how much was my own invention.

I believed the story. I just didn’t think Victor Hugo was telling it truthfully.

I didn’t believe Jean Valjean had stolen bread, that that was why he had to make amends. I suspected that Victor Hugo didn’t want to risk readers not cheering the hero on if he told the truth. Which was that Jean Valjean had killed someone. That he was a murderer. Jean Valjean was a good man, so the person he had killed must have deserved it. Yes, that was it. Jean Valjean had killed someone who had done something bad, and had to pay for it. The business about stealing bread just annoyed me. So I rewrote the story. I made it better.

So: Jean Valjean was a deadly killer who was wanted throughout France. And he was in love with Fantine, the poor prostitute. So in love that he was willing to do anything for her. Everything he did for her, he did out of love, madness, devotion, not to save his own immortal soul or out of love for his fellow man. He submitted to beauty. Yes, that’s what he did. Submitted to and obeyed the beauty of this ruined, sick, dying prostitute with no teeth or hair. He saw beauty where no one could imagine it. And for that reason it was his alone. And he was its.

It took ten days for the fever to start to ease. For me it had felt like one day, and when I came back Mum sat on the edge of the bed, stroked my forehead, sobbed gently and told me how close it had been.

I told her I had been to a place that I wanted to go back to.

“No, you mustn’t say that, Olav, darling!”

I could see what she was thinking. Because she had a place that she always wanted to go back to, where she would travel in a bottle.

“But I don’t want to die, Mummy. I just want to make up stories.”