Punishment aka What Is Mine

SIX

Emilie felt bigger when the new boy arrived. He was even more frightened than she was. When the man pushed him into the room a while ago, he had pooped his pants, even though he was nearly old enough to be at school. At one end of the room there was a sink and a toilet. The man had thrown a towel and a bar of soap in with the boy and Emilie managed to wash him up. But there were no clean clothes anywhere. She pushed the dirty underpants under the sink, between the wall and the pipe. The boy just had to go without underpants and would not stop crying.

Until now. He had finally fallen asleep. There was only one bed in the room. It was very narrow and probably very old. The woodwork was brown and worn and someone had drawn on it with a felt-tip pen, making marks that were barely visible anymore. When Emilie lifted the sheet, she saw that the mattress was full of long hair; a woman’s hair was stuck to the foam mattress and she quickly tucked the sheet back in place. The boy lay under the duvet with his head in her lap. He had brown curly hair and Emilie started to wonder if he could talk at all. He had snivelled his name when she asked. Kim or Tim. It was hard to make out. He had called for his mother, so he wasn’t entirely mute.

“Is he sleeping?”

Emilie jumped. The door was ajar. The shadows made it hard to see his face, but his voice was clear. She nodded weakly.

“Is he sleeping?”

The man didn’t seem to be angry or annoyed. He didn’t bark like Daddy sometimes did when he had to ask the same question several times.

“Yes.”

“Good. Are you hungry?”

The door was made of iron, and there was no handle on the inside. Emilie did not know how long she had been in the room with the toilet and the sink in one corner and the bed in the other and nothing else apart from plaster walls and the shiny door. It was a long time, that was all she knew. She had tried the door a hundred times at least. It was smooth and ice cold. The man was scared that it would shut behind him. The few times that he had come into the room, he had fixed the door to a hook on the wall. Normally when he brought her food and something to drink, he left it on a tray just inside the door.

“No.”

“Okay. You should go to sleep as well. It’s night.”

Night.

The sound of the heavy iron door closing made her cry. Even though the man said it was night, it didn’t feel like it. There was no window in the room and the light was left on the whole time, so there was no way of knowing whether it was day or night. At first she had thought that slices of bread and milk meant that it was breakfast and the stews and pancakes that the man left on the tray were supper. She finally understood, but then the man started to play tricks. Sometimes she got bread three times in a row. Today, after Kim or Tim had stumbled into her world, the man had given them tomato soup twice. It was lukewarm and there was no macaroni in it.

Emilie tried to stop crying. She didn’t want to wake the boy. She held her breath so that she wouldn’t shake, but it didn’t work.

“Mommy,” she sobbed, without wanting to. “I want my mommy.”

Daddy would be looking for her. He must have been looking for a long time. Daddy and Auntie Beate were no doubt still running around in the woods, even though it was night. Maybe Granddad was there too. Grandma had sore feet, so she would be at home reading books or making waffles for the others to eat when they’d been to the Road to Paradise and the Heaven Tree and not found her anywhere.

“Mommy,” whimpered Kim or Tim and then howled.

“Hush.”

“Mommy! Daddy!”

The boy got up suddenly and shrieked. His mouth was a great gaping hole. His face twisted into one enormous scream and she pressed herself against the wall and closed her eyes.

“You mustn’t scream,” she said in a flat voice. “The man will get angry with us.”

“Mommy! I want my Daddy!”

The boy caught his breath. He was gasping for air, and when Emilie opened her eyes she saw that his face was dark red. Snot was running from one nostril. She grabbed one corner of the duvet and wiped him clean. He tried to hit her.

“Don’t want,” he said and sobbed again. “Don’t want.”

“Shall I tell you a story?” asked Emilie.

“Don’t want.”

He pulled his sleeve across his nose.

“My Mommy is dead,” said Emilie and smiled a bit. “She’s sitting in Heaven watching over me. Always. I’m sure she can watch over you too.”

“Don’t want.”

At least the boy wasn’t crying so hard anymore.

“My Mommy is named Grete. And she’s got a BMW.”

“Audi,” said the boy.

“Mommy’s got a BMW in Heaven.”

“Audi,” the boy repeated, with a cautious smile that made him much nicer.

“And a unicorn. A white horse with a horn on its forehead that can fly. Mommy can fly anywhere on her unicorn when she can’t be bothered to use the BMW. Maybe she’ll come here. Soon, I think.”

“With a bang,” said the boy.

Emilie knew very well that her mother didn’t have a BMW. She wasn’t in Heaven at all and unicorns don’t exist. There was no Heaven either, even though Daddy said there was. He liked so much to talk about what Mommy was doing up there, everything that she had always wanted but they could never afford. In Paradise, nothing cost anything. They didn’t even have money there, Daddy said, and smiled. Mommy could have whatever she wanted and Daddy thought it was good for Emilie to talk about it. She had believed him for a long time, and it was good to think that Mommy had diamonds as big as plums in her ears as she flew around in a red dress on a unicorn.

Auntie Beate had told Daddy off. Emilie disappeared to write a letter to Mommy and when Daddy eventually found her, Auntie Beate shouted so loudly that the walls shook. The grown-ups thought Emilie was asleep. It was late at night.

“It’s about time you told the child the truth, Tønnes. Grete is dead. Period. She is ashes in an urn and Emilie is old enough to understand. You have to stop. You’ll ruin her with all your stories. You’re keeping Grete alive artificially and I’m not even sure who you’re actually trying to fool, yourself or Emilie. Grete is dead. Dead, do you understand?”

Auntie Beate was crying and angry at the same time. She was the smartest person in all the world. Everyone said that. She was a chief doctor and knew everything about sick hearts. She saved people from certain death, just because she knew so much. If Auntie Beate said that Daddy’s stories were garbage, then she must be right. A few days later, Daddy had taken Emilie out into the garden to look at the stars. There were four new holes in the sky, because Mommy wanted to see her better, he told her, pointing. Emilie didn’t answer. He was sad. She could see it in his eyes when he picked up a book and started to read to her on the bed. She refused to listen to the rest of the story about Mommy’s trip to Japan Heaven, a story that had stretched over three evenings and was actually quite funny. Daddy made money by translating books and was a bit too fond of stories.

“My name is Kim,” said the boy, and put his thumb in his mouth.

“My name is Emilie,” said Emilie.

They didn’t know that it was starting to get light out when they fell asleep.

One and a half stories above them, at ground level, in a house on the edge of a small wood, a man sat and stared out the window. He was feeling remarkably good, nearly intoxicated, as if he was facing a challenge that he knew he could master. It was impossible to sleep properly. During the night he had sometimes felt himself slipping away, only to be roused again by a very clear thought.

The window looked west. He saw the darkness huddle in behind the horizon. The hills on the other side of the valley were bathed in strips of morning light. He got up and put the book on the table.

No one else knew. In less than two days one of the two children in the cellar would be dead. He felt no joy in this knowledge, but a feeling of elated determination made him indulge in a bit of sugar and a drop of milk in the bitter coffee from the night before.