The Cold Song (19 page)

Milla picked herself up and walked a little farther.

She looked up at the dark sky.

“Mama!” she whispered. “Papa!” And then she sat down on the verge again, clasped her hands, and tried to pray. She had heard another car approaching and knew that it wasn’t her parents in that car. She had known it all along, that they wouldn’t be coming and that she wouldn’t make it home in time. He had said he was going to get the car and she had known this was important and had tried to understand what it meant, and now she understood that he was coming for her, and so she shut her eyes and covered her ears. Didn’t want to hear the car. Didn’t want to see it. Now all she wanted to do was sit here and breathe until she was no longer breathing.

The car drew closer and even though she had closed her eyes, she was aware of everything around her being flooded with light.

THE SUMMER DISAPPEARED
along with Milla and already it was October and she had been gone for three months. Jon’s book was postponed. The dog needed a walk.

Leopold raised his head and looked at his master:
He is not writing. And pretty soon he will rest his head on his computer keyboard and cry
.

Jon’s writing room in Oslo was in the attic, just like at Mailund. The room was partially renovated, the walls painted white, and a double-glazed skylight had been installed in the sloping ceiling so that he could look out. He had a desk in the corner and a mattress on the floor.

Jon stared out the window facing up to the sky and down onto the driveway, but the sun was too bright to see anything so he grabbed the dog’s gray blanket, pulled it out from under its long black forepaws, forcing Leopold up onto his feet. The animal staggered slightly, shook himself, and Jon draped the blanket over the old curtain rod so that it covered the window completely. There! Now it was dark!

He will never finish that book
. Leopold lay down warily on the floor, this time without his blanket, his muzzle against Jon’s feet.
Never!

Jon and Siri were still living off the income from the Oslo restaurant, plus the money from a huge bank loan and a rapidly disappearing fourth advance from the publisher. All Jon had to do now was write the third part of what had once been described (on the basis of the two parts that were already written and published) as the “great turn-of-the-millennium trilogy” and “the most important novel of the decade about our nation.” Expectations were overwhelmingly high, or at least they had been, it was in part three that he would prove to be at
the very height of his powers
. Jon should have completed the manuscript five years ago, but no, the days went by, his marriage went down the drain, his daughter Alma was troubled, and then there was Milla who came and disappeared and after that, it had been impossible to write anything at all.

Jon was himself over fifty, confronted every day in the mirror with a slightly shriveled, prune-like face and a not inconsiderable paunch that stuck out from or, rather, drooped from his otherwise skinny frame. The attractive young mothers he met every morning when he took Liv to nursery school looked straight through him.

Every Thursday evening Jon went running with his dentist friend Kurt Mandl, the husband of his dentist mistress, Karoline. Once, twice, three times around the lake and guess who was out of breath and struggling with steamed-up spectacles after the first round, and calling to cancel more often than not?

“We’re not getting any younger, Jon!” Kurt Mandl shouted.

“No, of course not,” Jon shouted back.

Kurt’s dogs were, like Kurt himself, admirable in most every way. Kurt only had to make a clicking sound with his tongue for the dogs to be there by his side. Taking Leopold for a run like that was quite out of the question. If Leopold were allowed to go loose, he would simply take off. If he were on a leash, he would drag and tug and bark at other dogs and make a spectacle of himself and his master.

Jon ran his fingers over the keys and wrote:

And it was only going to get worse, everything coming undone. He thought of Milla’s mother, Amanda, wandering
from room to room, screaming out her grief for her lost daughter.

He and Siri had often talked about how they must write a letter to Milla’s parents, they had to try to make amends for those awful summer days in July and August right after she had disappeared and they were all out looking and they hadn’t known what to say. He remembered that on the second day, Amanda—until then holding herself together—shouted at them: “You can’t just stand there and not know! It’s not good enough! Please! She lived in your house! You were supposed to watch over her!”

Write them a letter. But with what words? What could you possibly write in such a letter?

Jon slid the mouse up to point four and point eight in his misery list and pressed
DELETE
. Siri checked his mobile, she checked his e-mails, she opened the documents on his computer entitled “TRILOGY PART THREE,” partly searching for traces of what she in arguments referred to as his “untold life,” but also to check whether he was, in fact,
writing
. They didn’t talk about it and he didn’t stop her.

Sometimes he did write something. A page maybe, precisely because he knew that she would read it. He wrote for her. And he wouldn’t let her find out about the other women. That was nothing. Or not nothing. It was beside the point.

He deleted the entire misery list and wrote a new one, fit for Siri to read.

Milla left the party and had texted him and he had texted her, but her cell phone had never been found and he hoped to God it never would be.

Jenny and Alma got back to Mailund as the party was winding down. They had been on a frenetic ride around the country roads. Jenny had been drunk and Jon and Siri had been furious at her. How could she go off drunk with Alma like that? How could she? But the celebration was still going on in the garden and Jenny ignored both of them, went and sat down next to Steve Knightley from Seattle.

And when the last guests were gone, and Jenny had gone to bed, and Alma had gone to bed, and Siri had gone to bed, Jon sat down at the end of one of the trestle tables and finished a bottle of red wine.

Eventually he got up and wended his unsteady way over to the annex where Milla stayed while with them. To see if she had come home? To see if she was all right? Why wouldn’t
she be? It was her night off and she could stay out as long as she wanted. She wasn’t a child.

Jon made sure that no one saw him, he knocked on the door and waited a few seconds before stepping inside. He stood for a moment in the dark room, the pent-up smell of perfume, the unmade bed, the untidy desk, the overflowing bookshelves, the dirty clothes on the floor. He walked over to the desk and ran a hand over the magazines and makeup and a pink book that he realized must be her diary, that secret scrapbook she had told him about. He tucked it into his waistband, under the thick sweater. He felt his heart pounding. He opened the two clothes cupboards. Did he think that she would be hiding in there? He pulled the blue-and-white striped duvet off the bed and noticed a dark lump lying on the sheet. He took out his mobile and studied the lump in the light from the screen. He jumped back and let out a quiet scream at the sight of the black slug on the white sheet.

JON NEVER STOPPED
admiring his wife. Her graceful movements, her asymmetrical back, her slender wrists. Siri bemoaned the lines on her face and what the years had done to her (as if the years had asked her to dance and then rudely stepped on her toes), and he noticed how she was always checking her reflection in shopwindows and in the dark, gleaming paintwork of parked cars.

Jon told her often that she was prettier than ever before.

The first time he saw her had been from afar, and it was the very way she moved that had made him fall in love with her. She had walked straight past him, not noticing him at all, or at least pretending not to notice him, and he remembers thinking that he had never seen a woman move so gracefully.

Leopold got up and left the attic room. Jon heard him padding down the stairs, it was the same padding sound he heard every morning and every night. When Leopold was dead, when the dog was gone, he’d still hear it.

Over the past fifteen years the drafty house had somehow come to encapsulate the sounds of his family—Leopold’s pad-pad on the stairs, Siri’s cheerful hello every time she came home, Alma’s tireless rendering of “Little Song Thrush.” He could still hear it, his daughter singing, that bright, childish
voice of hers, like a little flute in the house, distinct from the girl herself. Alma had just turned thirteen and it was years since she had sung anything at all.

Jon had the house to himself for a few hours and could do what he liked. He could lie down on the floor and sleep. That would be nice. Just sleep it all away: Siri, Alma, Milla, all those female glances, his intolerable friend Kurt, and his intolerable friend’s humorless wife.

Note to self: Must break it off with Karoline!

He had downloaded all the music from the seventeenth-century Purcell opera
King Arthur
on his computer and played it over and over again. There was an aria in particular he couldn’t stop listening to about a cold man waking up. The man pleads with the higher powers—What power art thou?—that they leave him alone and let him go back to that unconcious state of mind where he had dwelled. He is excoriated. Alone. Freezing. Trembling.

I can scarcely move or draw my breath
,

I can scarcely move or draw my breath
.

Purcell died a few years after composing his masterpiece, supposedly having caught a chill after his wife, Frances, angered by something, locked him out of their apartment.

A man wakes up and for a few moments he experiences everything exactly as it is.

Jon wrote:
A man wakes up and is lucid
.

It doesn’t last long, though, he thought, that kind of lucidity. If it did you wouldn’t be able to stand it, it would kill you.

Let me, let me, freeze again to death

Jon blinked and turned the music up, he didn’t want to fall asleep, because then Siri would come into the attic room and just look at him until he woke up, and say things like
The writer at work, I see
.

And still: It took only a minute or two. He called Leopold’s name and heard him pad-padding back up the stairs. “Come here, boy! Come lie down here.” And then Jon lay down on the floor beside his dog, inhaled the calming scent of him—grass, Bourbon, tar, and something hot and sweet and alive—and fell asleep.

“FUCK YOU, MAMA!” Jon opened his eyes and sat up sharply as Alma’s voice cut through the house. It was half past one and he had slept for hours and now they were back from town. Siri had taken Liv and Alma shopping. “Don’t worry,” she had told him. “Just write.” Those precious hours alone—wasted. “It will all be fine,” she’d said and touched his hand. Wasted. That gift. Those hours. And what had he done? Surfed the Internet. Thought about Karoline. Listened to the entire libretto of John Dryden who in contrast to Jon Dreyer had gotten down to the business of working. And slept on the floor. All this and now they came tumbling back into his life. The front door slamming. The chorus on his computer singing. “FUCK YOU, MAMA!” Siri shouting, “Jon! Jon! Have you remembered to walk Leopold? He probably needs to go.”

What Jon needed was a long spell on his own. No children. No Siri. No dog. Borrow that house in Sandefjord that an acquaintance had offered him. Jon got up from the floor and
sat at his laptop and pounded away on the keys. This so that Siri, if she put her ear to his door, would hear the sound of working. Click click click! He looked at the book on the desk.
Danish Literature: A Short Critical Survey
by Poul Borum (Copenhagen: Det Danske Selskab, 1979). He turned to page seven and proceeded to type what was written there.
Preliminary Remarks: This book is a short survey of contemporary Danish literature, preceded by an even shorter sketch of the first thousand years of Danish literature
click click click.