Fear Not

May 1962

The Encounter

Eva Karin has just turned sixteen, and she has a dress made of pale blue polyester.

Her mother made it, just as she has made every single dress Eva Karin has ever owned. This is the best one of all, and the first with an adult cut – a Jackie Kennedy dress she didn’t even get around to wishing for. She didn’t get around to wishing for anything at all. She didn’t give her birthday a thought.

There has been no room for anything apart from this one huge thing, this terrible thing that has to go away.

When she opened her present she had to pretend she was happy. As if it were possible for her to be happy. Her mother was so overjoyed with the beautiful material and her fine stitching that she didn’t notice how Eva Karin was feeling.

No one can see how Eva Karin is feeling. Except God, if He exists.

She put on the dress when she got up this morning. Her mother was annoyed; she was supposed to save it until 17 May, Norway’s National Day. Eva Karin said she didn’t want to be late for school, and hadn’t got time to change. Her mother gave in. She was also a little proud, Eva Karin could see that. Dark-eyed, black-haired Eva Karin with the ice-blue dress that made her look American.

She had hidden the ballerina pumps in her bag. She changed out of her sensible walking shoes as soon as she was out of sight.

Eva Karin has dressed up to die.

She doesn’t want anyone she knows to find her body. She is heading up to Løvstakken, all the way up; her younger siblings are too little to go up there, and her mother and father never set foot there either.

The air is sharp and clear. It’s chilly, and she pulls the golf jacket more tightly around her. She has to look where she’s going. There are roots and stones on the track, and she doesn’t want her ballerina pumps to get dirty.

Her father doesn’t believe in God.

Eva Karin wants to believe in God.

She has prayed so hard.

She has read His book, which she has to hide in her underwear drawer so that her father won’t find it. Religion is the opium of the people, he frequently growls, and Eva Karin and her siblings are the only children she knows who have not been baptized and confirmed. She has read and searched in the forbidden Bible, but all she finds is condemnation.

God and her father are in agreement on just one thing: people like her have no right to live.

People like her must be spoken about using a particular language. A particular language consisting of looks, gestures and words which actually mean something else, but when they are used about people like her, they acquire a dark meaning that she cannot live with.

She always thought it was only men who were like that.

They exist, she knows they exist, because they are the ones who become the object of those ambiguous words, those looks, those obscene gestures the boys make behind Mr Berstad’s back, making the girls snigger. All except Eva Karin, who blushes.

She stops for a moment. The sun is shining down through the fresh new leaves. The ground looks as if it is covered with shimmering liquid gold. Dense carpets of wood anemones surround the trees, protecting the roots. The birds are singing, and high above the treetops, white fluffy clouds drift by.

She has been going out with Erik for six months now.

Erik is nice. He never touches her. Doesn’t want to kiss and cuddle, doesn’t grope her the way her friends tell her the other boys do. Erik reads books and works hard in school. They drink tea together, and Erik sometimes shows her a few of the poems he has written, which are not particularly good. Eva Karin enjoys Erik’s company. She feels safe. She feels calm when she is with Erik. Not like when she sees Martine.

Suddenly she sets off again.

She mustn’t think about Martine. She mustn’t see Martine in her mind’s eye, when they stay the night with each other and their mothers don’t even knock on the door when they come in to say goodnight.

Eva Karin has prayed and prayed. That she might escape Martine. That she might find the strength to stop wanting her. Eva Karin has spent entire nights on her knees by her bed, with her hands clasped together and her eyes closed. No one has answered her, not even on those occasions when she placed shards of of glass beneath her knees. Martine is with Eva Karin whether she is there or not; she never goes away. Eva Karin prays until she faints with exhaustion, but no one ever answers her prayers. Perhaps her father is right after all, just as he is right when he says that people like her are an abomination.

Her father and mother must never know, thinks Eva Karin as she stumbles on up the track. Her father, who has sung to her, played with her, who made a wooden doll’s pram for her in his workshop when she was five years old; her father who cheered and swung her up on to his shoulders and carried her along in the procession every year on 1 May until she got too heavy, and was allowed to carry the left-hand tassel on the trade union flag instead; her father must never find out that his daughter is one of those.

One of those.

Eva Karin is one of those.

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.