The Writing on the Wall

Thirty-nine

NOWHERE IN NORWAY is the sky so heavy as over Jæren. Nowhere is there so much sea in it. On grey days, sky and sea form as one towards the horizon as though a piece of sky has been folded under the land. On sunny days the sea blows up, and before you know it, it’s raining.

That day a thin layer of frost lay on the horizon, a stroke from a feather quill that would remain there even in the darkness of night.

‘The stamp of February,’ muttered Einar Litlabø, nodding seawards.

‘How do you mean?’

‘That the sea’s never darker than at this time of year. As though the colour from all the winter nights had seeped down here, into a kind of melting pot. That’s why we have the heavy storms in late winter, so everything can be released before spring. Didn’t you know that?’

He had invited me to accompany him on a short walk along narrow tracks that lay in the most sheltered hollows in the windswept terrain and were marked out by sombre dry-stone walls, the timeless boundaries of Norwegian farmland, which were always a bone of contention with somebody or other: the source of hundreds of court cases relating to wills, thousands of arguments between neighbours. He appeared to welcome this break in the daily routine, and when I had told the duty doctor about the period I’d spent in Hjellestad some years before, they had allowed us outside the premises without a permit, in the belief that he was in good hands.

His resemblance to his sister lay mainly in the colour of his hair. Einar Litlabø had dark, shoulder-length hair with streaks of grey, as if life had passed him by all too fast, and he had never had time to go to the barber’s.

His face was thin with deep furrows running from his nostrils down both sides of his mouth. His brow looked permanently wrinkled, and the anxiety smouldering away in his eyes told me why he was here.

‘B-B-Birger? Do you want to talk about Birger? Why?’

‘Are you still in contact with him?’

‘With Birger? Oh no! Not for many years now. That was when we were little. Long before he left Stavanger.’

‘But you knew him well then, didn’t you? When you were both kids?’

‘Y-Y-Yes I did! We were best mates, Birger and me. Best mates.’

‘So you didn’t mind that the others called him Nazi bastard?’

‘Good God, Nazi bastard… Birger was fine though. Our lot came from gypsy stock, actually… Didn’t Trude tell you that? No, I suppose she didn’t. No.’

‘I only exchanged a few worth with her.’

‘That’s understandable. Gypsies who’ve settled down and Nazi bastards, they were much of a muchness.’

‘You were bullied – or teased, as they probably called it then – you and your sister?’

‘And all our other brothers and sisters too. There were six of us, no seven, but one of them died when she was little.’

I tried to broach the topic again. ‘Who was it who teased you then? Birger Bjelland and you?’

‘Well, he didn’t call himself Bjelland in those days, did he? It was Birger Haugane then… Yes and who do you think it was? All the good-looking, clever ones, all the ones who had both a mother and father and who were fair-haired, had proper teeth and lots of cash in their school bankbooks. In those days we hadn’t so much as five kroner in ours, see?’

‘But you gave as good as you got I suppose?’

‘Gave as good as we got? They went home with bloody noses and muddied clothes, every last one of them. But who was it got the blame, do you think? Them or us? Who was it that was threatened with being sent to reform school if we didn’t behave?’

‘There was one called Roger…’

He clammed up suddenly, glancing over the nearest dry-stone wall and out to sea. For a moment it was as though his eyes took on the colours of what they saw, a mixture of grey and white, with a black pulsating heart that was suddenly beating too fast.

‘Roger Hansen, wasn’t it?’

He stopped and pointed out to sea. ‘See that… the ship there? When I’m walking here, I often think that it’s on board a ship like that I should have been, one that sailed away and never came back. The only problem, though, is that the earth’s round, and if you sail far enough away, you always end up back where you started from anyway.’

I nodded in agreement before adding: ‘And that’s just what our lives are like too. We think time only moves in one direction. Yet it’s not just the senile who return to their childhood. Every one of us has to do that at some time in our life, Einar.’

He stood there, looking thoughtful, as if he was somewhere else, in a completely different time from the present.

‘He drowned, didn’t he?’ I said softly.

‘What…’ He swung round to face me. ‘Why have you come here, Veum? Who do you represent? What do you want?’

‘Do you have any children, Einar?’

‘Do I have any…’ His gaze began to wander again. He looked down as though in search of something for his eyes to settle on. ‘Two girls and a boy. Two marriages. I’m still in contact with the boy. I’m not allowed to see the girls. Not till I’m – completely…’

‘In that case, I’m going to tell you a thing or two about your childhood mate and the sort of business I think he’s behind in Bergen.’

I told him about the young girls at Jimmy’s and the sort of activities they were recruited for. Perhaps I laid it on a bit thick, especially considering how sure I was that Birger Bjelland was the moving force behind it all, but it struck home. As I told him bit by bit, his look gradually steadied, and his face somehow became even more lined and almost emaciated-looking. ‘It could have been one of your children, Einar; it could have been – mine.’

He turned his back to the sea and looked in over the land, as if there was more hope in the Norwegian bedrock. ‘I think we should turn back now.’

We set off again.

‘Who told you about – Roger?’

‘Kathrine Haugane.’

He looked at me quickly as though to see whether I was serious.

‘In her way.’ I tried to imitate her voice: ‘Birger! Don’t do it! Roger! Oh no…’

‘So she…’ He looked at me wide-eyed. ‘So she saw it too!’

‘Saw what, Einar?’

He hesitated for a few more moments. Then it came, slowly at first, as though he had to reconstruct it all, then quicker, bit by bit, as he got into his stride. ‘We were seven years old, in the first class at primary school. I called on Birger, to play with him. But there was nobody at home. So I walked down towards Mosvatnet Lake, we often used to play there. This was in January, and there was ice on the water. Suddenly, I saw the two of them, Roger and him, a long way out. Then suddenly something happened. I think they started to quarrel. In any case, Birger shoved Roger so hard that he – fell, like this, forwards, and then… Then the ice broke, and he fell through it.’

He swallowed heavily. But I didn’t give him a helping hand this time. This was a story he had to tell in his own way, for now. ‘I… Roger bobbed back up again, waving his arms, but Birger, he just turned his back on him and ran off. At first, I thought he was perhaps going to fetch one of those life-saving hooks that had been placed around the lake, but then… he just vanished, ran off home, I think. And so did Roger. Vanish, I mean. He didn’t come back up again.’ He averted his eyes from me with a look of someone asking for forgiveness. ‘We were so young, you see! It all happened so fast. One moment it had happened. The next moment all was calm again. Just a hole in the ice. As though nothing had…’

‘So you – didn’t say anything to anyone either?’

‘No, I… When the police started looking for him later that day, there were some other people who’d seen him on his way down to Mosvatnet Lake, and when the police found the hole in the ice… they soon found him. And not many questions were asked afterwards either. It was only a child, after all! Just an accident!’ Pensively, he added: ‘But the fact that Mrs Haugane also… Why on earth do you think she didn’t do anything?’

I shrugged. ‘Who can tell, so many years after? She had first-hand experience of what it was like to be an outcast and hounded like a dog. Perhaps she recognised her own tormentors in those who tormented her son. Because Roger was one of those who used to tease him?’

‘One of the worst. No denying that.’

I glanced sideways at him. ‘And you’ve carried this around with you all these years?’

The pain in his face was clear to see. ‘Not just that…’

‘Not just that. Is there more? Involving Birger?’

‘It’s only a theory. But that’s how it is, isn’t it, the first time’s the worst?’

‘Do you mean that he, that – there were others?’

In the distance we could see the institution he was on his way back to, looking like a school building on top of the hill.

‘There was quite a bit about it in the papers when it happened, but there was never a case about it.’

‘Oh?’

‘It was the year he was doing military service. At Evjemoen. There was a soldier who was killed by a stray bullet, or whatever you call it, when the barrel gets blocked with snow so the whole rifle explodes.’

‘And then?’

‘Well, it’s just not something that happens every day. The chap who was killed was one of the same lot who used to tease him at school, look…’ He opened his left hand and showed an oblique scar on his palm. ‘I still have a scar from his sheath knife! And Birger was in the same section as him.’

‘You mean that it was him who blocked the barrel?’

He nodded. ‘Maybe.’

‘What was the soldier’s name?’

‘Ragn… Ragnar Hillevåg.’

‘And roughly when did this happen?’

‘You can find it in the paper, but – but I did my military service in 1964. I think it was the year after.’

‘But it’s only supposition, surely? It was never mentioned afterwards?’

‘Well, just that many years later, in a bar in town, I got talking to one of the others who’d been in the camp at the same time. And he said the atmosphere was very tense among all the recruits from Stavanger right through basic training school, and that was because Hillevåg was rubbing salt in old wounds.’

‘Not just with Birger, then?’

‘That’s right, but… it was only Birger who’d killed anybody! I mean and I’d seen it!’

We were back now. He looked in at the lights from the dayroom as though regretting our walk and was now solely intent on parking himself in front of the TV and forgetting everything.

‘You don’t have to carry that burden alone any more, Einar,’ I said comfortingly. ‘As you said yourself, you two were only kids. Kathrine Haugane should have known better. But what does one not do for one’s children?’

He nodded. ‘The children are the writing on the wall for us, Veum.’

I started. ‘The writing on… How do you mean? The writing on the wall means a signal, a warning.’

‘And that’s just what our children are. If they go off the rails, so do we. And I’m not saying it’s our fault, if things go wrong. It can just as easily be – ha! – society or the age or just something in their make-up, a tendency they’ve inherited from far back…’

‘The sins of the fathers?’

‘I don’t know. All I do know is that when things go wrong with those who are new to life then everything else goes to pot as well! Weighed in the balance and found wanting, eh, Veum? Weighed in the balance and found wanting, every last one of us.’