Obit Delayed (18 page)

Authors: Helen Nielsen

BOOK: Obit Delayed

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He waved one hand as Ruth, grabbing me by one arm, led our exodus. “Forward to Fløyen!” she cried, and I felt a brief pang of disappointment. She sounded as wholesome as a scout leader.

I’m afraid that I’m not a very good tourist. Perhaps that is a talent found only in the very young—or the very old. But my friend from Iowa was wonderful. She had studied all the guide books and absorbed all the local color. The quaint, pointed-roofed houses that lined our way were living history to her, and our progress, in spite of the soft drizzle, was slow. There were snapshots to be taken, and before one great shell-pocked and roofless ruin of what seemed to be an ancient hall we paused long enough for her to deliver a typical guidebook lecture. It was an intricate and inspiring tale involving a mixture of medieval history and occupation heroism, and I should have listened with more interest and did not. The sight of the ruin stirred up something almost like a memory.

“Is there a staircase, I wonder,” I mused aloud. “A winding stone staircase.”

Ruth Atkins stopped in the middle of her speech.

“Why do you ask that?” she demanded.

I was at loss to give an answer. I hardly knew where my own question had originated. I tried to shrug it off.

“Search me,” I said. “Maybe I was thinking of some other place.”

“But I thought you said you’d never been to Bergen.”

“I haven’t. Maybe I saw a picture in a guidebook. Look, here, hadn’t we better be getting on to the funicular, or whatever it is? We don’t have all morning.”

I started off in long strides. Ruth had to trot a little to catch up with me. I wanted to get away from that ruin—it depressed me. Ruins of any kind aren’t the gayest of sights, and for me this wasn’t the gayest of days. It should have been. I suppose that’s what was bothering me: it should have been. A few blocks further along and we reached the open market, and here the sight was gay. Fish, prawns, fresh berries that must have been brought down from the mountains, and, a few steps farther the flower market with a colorful array that surely must have almost exhausted Ruth Atkins’ supply of film. There was no use urging her on until she’d spent herself dashing in and out among the wagons and stalls. I hadn’t been a husband all these years without learning how to stand still and wait.

It was quite a sight, at that—the little fishing boats nodding at their moorings in the background, the colorful merchandise, and all the merchants and their customers quite oblivious to the rain. There were raincoats and umbrellas a-plenty; but I was intrigued by one husky, red-faced woman who was shielded from the weather by only a soggy black felt hat, a heavy knit sweater ravelled at the cuffs, and a bloodstained apron covering her skirt. The blood was from the huge fish she gutted methodically, but in the midst of her work she looked up, saw me watching her, and smiled. For the moment of the smile her face was beautiful.

“Mark, are you ready? Shall we go on?”

I didn’t hear Ruth Atkins until she touched my arm, and in that instant I wanted to grab hold of her and tell her to look quickly so as not to miss the fishwife’s smile. And then I didn’t, because I didn’t know why it was so important—anymore than I knew why the ruins back along the quay should have had stone steps.

“What’s the matter?” Ruth asked. “Is something wrong?”

The foolishness must have been showing on my face. I bluffed it out.

“Come on,” I said. “We’ll have to hurry if we’re going to take that ride to the top of the mountain now.”

I took her arm, and we started across the street.

“We don’t know the way,” she protested. “Look, there’s a policeman—”

But the signal was with us, and I kept walking, half-dragging her along with me.

“No time,” I reminded. “It’s this way.”

“But you don’t know!”

“It’s got to be this way!”

We were almost running by the time we reached the opposite curb. Ruth didn’t protest anymore. What she was thinking, I couldn’t guess. What I was thinking, I couldn’t understand. Perhaps it was all coincidence after all. I might have noticed which way the visiting tourists were going as I waited for Ruth to finish her picture-taking at the open market It was certain we weren’t the only passengers from the
Oslofjord
making this shore excursion. In any event, the funicular station was at the head of the street, just where I expected it to be, and we were just in time to make the car that was loading as I bought the tickets.

“Beginner’s luck,” Ruth remarked as we scrambled aboard.

“And a good thing, too,” I said. “A minute later and we’d have had to wait for the next trip. Quick, there’s one seat left. Grab it!”

It was a small train—one car with a door for each double row of seats and no middle aisle. It had all filled up but the last compartment when we came aboard, and Ruth managed to get that one last seat alongside the right-hand window. I stood facing her and in a moment all of the aisles were filled. We were tourists, mostly,—familiar faces from the ship; but there were others, too. Most noticeable, a completely indifferent Norseman who sat next to Ruth holding an aromatic keg of herring in his lap. When the compartment doors were all closed, the scent was anything but refreshing.

“It won’t be long,” Ruth suggested encouragingly. “Would you like to change places? Would you like to sit down?”

I looked at her. She had a worried expression on her face that matched the one she’d worn when Sundequist asked about my headaches. For some reason, the sight of it angered me. I don’t like worried women.

“Why should I?” I demanded.

“You look—well, peculiar.”

“I’ve got a peculiar face.”

The train began to move. I didn’t want to look at Ruth’s face anymore so I looked out of the window. Once outside of the station we could watch the panorama unfolding as more and more of the city came into view below us. First the rooftops, then the streets, then the harbor. It was a tourist’s delight. All about me I could hear the happy chatter and the clicking of cameras at the window. On the opposite side of the train we had a timbered view with an occasional glimpse of a path—the path Otto Sundequist claimed to have climbed in younger years.
And he could probably do it now
, I thought ruefully. I was beginning to face the fact I’d been fighting all morning: I felt terrible. If that keg of herring didn’t bring another headache it would be a miracle. I groped for my wristwatch to see how long we’d been on the way. The schedule called for a twelve-minute trip. But then the car began to slow down, and I knew we were reaching the halfway point.

The principle of the funicular was simple: one track and one cable with the ascending and descending cars counterbalanced. Halfway up the track the cars met and passed on a short run of double-track, and then continued on to exchange berths at the opposite ends of the hill. The point of passing was another attraction to the tourists. Below me, Ruth was already focusing her camera.

“I hope I can get a shot of the other car out of the window,” she said. “I hope there’s enough space between us. I’ve never ridden on anything like this before. Golly, look at that!”

She was leaning forward, her camera poised, and I could see the other car coming into view. Everybody else was looking in the same direction. Someone jostled me so that I had to grip the window frame for support, and for a moment the smell of the herring was intense. And then it began to happen. All around me the voices—and they were an excited babble—faded away. All motion stopped, all sense of time and space. I was somewhere outside myself looking on, and, like Ruth Atkins’ camera, my mind was focusing. I was waiting for something to happen, and it was as if what was going to happen had already happened in just this way before. I looked out of the window and knew exactly what I would see even as I began seeing it.

We were on the stretch of double-track, and the cars were passing but a few feet apart. Standing as I was, I could look down into the other car. It seemed strangely empty; but in the last compartment something was happening—some kind of struggle. I saw a man—tall, his back to the windows. He was standing over someone in the seat, even as I stood over Ruth Atkins, but he was bending forward with his shoulders hunched and his arms outstretched. I couldn’t see his face or even his head; but I could see his hands extending from the sleeves of what looked like a grayish-tan raincoat—reaching hands, clutching hands. And then I saw what those hands were reaching toward. I saw them fasten about a woman’s neck, and I saw a face—incredible lovely, pale, long blonde hair and huge, pleading eyes. For an instant the face turned toward me with all its fear and all its anguish—so hauntingly beautiful even in that moment of horror that it was the loveliness I saw rather than the horror; and then the man’s fingers tightened, the head snapped back, and the woman’s body slumped back against the seat.

It was all over. The train had passed.

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