Anne Holt: Fear Not

‘Are you OK?’ she smiled, caressing her niece’s cheek as her sister walked past.

‘Auntie,’ said Kristiane. ‘Auntie Bride! You look so beautiful!’

‘Which is more than you can say about your mother,’ muttered the bride.

Only Kristiane heard her. Johanne didn’t even glance at her sister. She hurried inside, into the warmth. She wanted to get to her room, crawl under the covers with her daughter, perhaps a bath, a hot bath. Her child was freezing cold and must be thawed out as soon as possible. She staggered across the floor, struggling to breathe. Even though Kristiane, who was almost fourteen, hardly weighed more than a ten-year-old, her mother was almost collapsing beneath her weight. In addition, her skirt was hanging down so much that she stood on it with every other step. Her hair, which she had wound around her head in a braid, had fallen down. The style had been Adam’s suggestion, and she had been sufficiently stressed in the hours before the wedding to take his advice. Just a few minutes into the celebrations she had felt like Brünnhilde in a production from the interwar years.

A well-built man came running down the stairs.

‘What’s happened? What… is she OK? Are you OK?’

Adam Stubo tried to stop his wife. She hissed at him through gritted teeth:

‘Stupid idea! We’re ten minutes from home by taxi. Ten minutes!’

‘What’s a stupid idea? What are we…? Let me carry her, Johanne. You’re dress is torn and it would be…’

‘It’s not a dress! It’s a national costume! It’s called a kirtle! And it was your idea! This ghastly hairstyle and this hotel and bringing Kristiane with us. She could have died!’

She was overcome by tears, and slowly let go of her daughter. The man with the strong arms gently took the child, and together they walked up the stairs. Neither of them said anything. Kristiane carried on singing in her thin, pure voice:

‘Hey hop fallerallera, when Christmas comes let every child rejoice!’

‘She’s asleep, Johanne. The doctor said she was fine. There’s no point in going home now. It’s…’

The man glanced over at the silent TV screen, where the hotel was still welcoming Mr & Mrs Stubo.

‘Quarter past three. It’s almost half past three in the morning, Johanne.’

‘I want to go home.’

‘But…’

‘We should never have agreed to this. Kristiane’s too young…’

‘She’s almost fourteen,’ said Adam, rubbing his face. ‘It’s hardly irresponsible to let a fourteen-year-old come to her aunt’s wedding. It was actually incredibly generous of your sister to pay for a suite and a babysitter.’

‘Some babysitter!’ She spat out the words in a mist of saliva.

‘Albertine fell asleep,’ Adam said wearily. ‘She lay down on the sofa when Kristiane finally went to sleep. What else was she supposed to do? That was why she was here, Johanne. Kristiane knows Albertine well. We can’t expect her to do any more than she was asked to do. She brought Kristiane up here after dessert. This was an accident, a sheer accident. You have to accept that.’

‘An accident? Is it an accident when a child like… like Kristiane manages to get out through a locked door without anyone noticing? When the babysitter – who, incidentally, Kristiane knows so well that she still refers to her as ‘the lady’ – is sleeping so heavily that Kristiane thought she was dead ? When the child starts wandering around a hotel full of people? People who were drunk! And then wanders out into the street in the middle of the night without proper clothes and without any shoes and without…’

She put her hands to her face, sobbing. Adam got up from his chair and sat down heavily beside her on the bed.

‘Can’t we go to bed?’ he said quietly. ‘Things will seem so much better in the morning. I mean, it all worked out fine after all. Let’s be grateful for that. Let’s get some sleep.’

She didn’t respond. Her hunched back trembled every time she breathed.

‘Mummy?’

Johanne quickly wiped her face and turned to her daughter with a big smile.

‘Yes, sweetheart?’

‘Sometimes I’m completely invisible.’

From the corridor came the sound of giggling and laughter. Someone was shouting ‘cheers!’ and a male voice wanted to know where the ice machine was.

Johanne lay down cautiously on the bed. She slowly caressed the girl’s thin, fair hair, and put her mouth close to Kristiane’s ear.

‘Not to me, Kristiane. You are never invisible to me.’

‘Oh yes I am,’ said Kristiane with a little laugh. ‘To you, too. I am the invisible child.’

And before her mother had time to protest – as the town-hall clock proclaimed that yet another half-hour had passed on this twentieth day of December – Kristiane fell into a deep sleep.

As the town-hall clock struck half past three, he decided that enough was enough.

He stood by the window, looking out at what there was to see.

Which wasn’t a great deal.

Ten hours earlier heavy snow had fallen on Oslo, making the city clean and light. In the empty silence of his office he had immersed himself so deeply in his work that he hadn’t noticed the change in the weather. The city lay dark and formless below him. Although it wasn’t raining, the air was so damp that water was trickling down the window panes. Akershus Fortress was discernible only as a vague shadow on the other side of the harbour. The grey, indolent crests of the waves were the only indication that the black expanse between Rådhuskaia and Nesodden, all the way out to Hurumlandet, was actually made up of fjord and sea.

But the lights were beautiful, street lamps and lanterns transformed into shimmering little stars through the wet glass.

Everything lay ready on his desk.

The Christmas presents.

A Caribbean cruise for his brother and sister and their families. On one of the company’s own ships, admittedly, but it was still a generous gift.

A piece of jewellery for his mother, who would turn sixty-nine on Christmas Eve; she never tired of diamonds.

A remote-controlled helicopter and a new snowboard for his son.

Nothing for Rolf, as they always agreed and invariably regretted.

And 20,000 kroner to charitable causes.

That was everything.

The personal gifts were quickly dealt with. It had taken less than half an hour with his regular jeweller in Amsterdam in November, a walk around a mall in Boston the same week, plus twenty minutes on the computer this evening to produce an attractive gift card for his brother and sister’s families. There were plenty of tempting pictures of Martinique and Aruba on the shipping company’s home pages. He was pleased with the result, and he managed to make it personal by lining up the entire family along the railing on board MS Princess Ingrid Alexandra at sunset.

It was the charitable donations that had taken time.

Marcus Koll Junior put his heart and soul into each donation. Dispensing generous gifts was his Christmas present to himself. It always did him good, and reminded him of his grandfather. The old man, who had been the closest thing to God that little Marcus could imagine, had once asked him the following question with a smile. A man helps ten other men who are in need, and takes the credit for doing so. A different man helps one other man in need, but keeps it to himself and gets no thanks for what he has done. Which of the two is the better person?

The ten-year-old replied that it was the first man, and had to defend his position. Marcus stuck to his guns for a long time: the intention of the donor was not the issue. It was the result that mattered. Helping ten people was better than helping one. The old man had stubbornly argued for the opposite point of view – until, at the age of fifteen, the boy changed his mind. Then his grandfather did the same. The argument continued until Marcus Koll Senior died at the age of ninety-three, leaving behind a well-organized life in a pale green folder with the logo of the Norwegian state railway on it. The documents showed that he had given away 20 per cent of everything he had earned throughout his adult life. Not 10 per cent, as was traditional within the labour movement, but 20. A fifth of his grandfather’s earnings had been a gift to those worse off than himself.