Anne Holt: Punishment aka What Is Mine

Adam Stubo lit a huge cigar, which signalled that he now considered the workday to be over.

“She is so right that it might be interesting to talk to her,” he said, grabbing his jacket. “See you tomorrow.”

A child doesn’t know when it’s going to die. It has no concept of death. Instinctively it fights for life, like a lizard that’s willing to give up its tail when threatened with extermination. All beings are genetically programmed to fight for survival. Children as well. But they have no concept of death. A child is frightened of real things. The dark. Strangers, perhaps, being separated from its family, pain, scary noises and the loss of objects. Death, on the other hand, is incomprehensible for a mind that is not yet mature.

A child does not know that it is going to die.

That is what the man was thinking as he got everything ready.

He poured some Coke into an ordinary glass and wondered why he was bothering with such thoughts. Even though the boy had not been picked at random, there were no emotional ties between them. The boy was a total stranger, emotionally, a pawn in an important game. He wouldn’t feel anything. In that sense, he was better served by dying. He missed his parents, a pain that was both understandable and to be expected in a boy of five, and surely that was worse than a swift, painless death.

The man crushed the Valium pill and sprinkled the pieces into the glass. It was a small dose; he just wanted the boy to fall asleep. It was important that he was asleep when he died. It was easiest. Practical. Injecting children is hard enough without them shouting and kicking.

The Coke made him thirsty. He moistened his lips slowly with his tongue. A shiver ran through the muscles in his back; in a way he was looking forward to it. To completing his detailed plan.

It would take six weeks and four days, if everything went according to schedule.

There was little sign that it was nearly midsummer. The water at Sognsvann was shrouded in a gray mist and the trees were still bare. Here and there, a few eager willows showed the beginnings of shoots, and on south-facing slopes, coltsfoot flowers stretched up on long stems. Otherwise, it could as easily have been the fourteenth of October as the fourteenth of May. A six-year-old in red overalls and yellow winter boots pulled off her hat.

“No, Kristiane. Don’t go in the water.”

“Just let her wade a bit. She’s got her boots on.”

“Jesus, Isak, it’s not shallow enough! Kristiane! No!”

The girl didn’t want to listen. She was humming a monotonous tune and standing with water over the top of her boots already. They filled up with a gurgling sound. The girl stared ahead with a blank expression, repeating the four notes to herself over and over.

“You’re soaking,” complained Johanne Vik as she hauled the girl ashore.

The child smiled happily at her feet and stopped singing.

Her mother took her by the arm and led her over to a bench a few yards away. She pulled some dry tights, a pair of thick socks, and heavy sneakers out of the backpack. Kristiane did not want to put them on. She sat stiffly and clenched her legs together, staring into space again, the same four notes vibrating at the back of her throat: dam-di-rum-ram. Dam-di-rum-ram.

“You’ll get ill,” said Johanne. “You’ll catch a cold.”

“Cold,” smiled Kristiane, and caught her mother’s eye fleetingly, suddenly alert.

“Yes, ill.”

Johanne tried to keep hold of the look, keep their eyes locked.

“Dam-di-rum-ram,” hummed Kristiane as she stiffened again.

“Here, let me.”

Isak took his daughter under the arms and threw her up into the air.

“Daddy,” shrieked Kristiane, catching her breath. “More!”

“More there will be,” shouted Isak, letting the child drag her soaking wet boots along the ground before throwing her up into the mist again. “Kristiane is a plane!”

“Plane! Fly plane! Flyman!”

Johanne had no idea where she got it from. The child put together words that neither she nor Isak used, nor anyone else for that matter. But there was also some kind of logic to them, a relevance that might be hard to grasp in the moment, but that implied a sense of linguistic understanding that contrasted sharply with the short, simple words that she otherwise used-and she only did it when she wanted to.

“Dam-di-rum-ram.”

The flight was over. The song had returned. But Kristiane sat quietly on her father’s knee and let him change her.

“Freezing bum,” said Isak, and tapped her lightly before pulling the dry tights on over her feet, her toes curling abnormally into the soles of her feet.

“Kristiane is freezing all over.”

“Kristianecold. Hungry.”

“There. Shall we go?”

He put the girl down in front of him. Then he stuffed the wet clothes into the backpack. He pulled a banana from one of the side pockets, peeled it, and gave it to Kristiane.

“Where were we?”

He ran his hand through his hair. The damp air made it stick together. He looked up. He had always seemed so young, even though he was really only one month younger than she was. Irresponsible and eternally young; his hair always slightly too long, his clothes just a little too loose, too baggy for his age. Johanne tried to swallow the familiar sense of defeat, the perpetual experience of being the one who was least good with Kristiane.

“Right, now tell me the rest of the story.”

He smiled encouragingly and made a small movement with his head. Kristiane was already ten yards in front of them, with her characteristic toddling walk that she should have grown out of long ago. Isak put his hand on Johanne’s shoulder for a moment before starting to walk too-slowly, as if uncertain that Johanne could follow at all.

“When Alvhild Sofienberg decided to look more closely at the case,” Johanne began, her eyes following the small figure that was once again heading for the water, “she met unexpected resistance. Aksel Seier didn’t want to talk to her.”

“Oh, why not? He’d applied for the pardon himself, so surely it must have been encouraging that someone from the Ministry was interested in following up his case?”

“You would think so. I don’t know. Kristiane!”

The girl turned around and laughed loudly. Slowly she turned away from the water and trundled over toward the edge of the wood; she must have seen something.

“Whatever, she didn’t give up. Alvhild Sofienberg, that is. She eventually managed to get in touch with the prison chaplain. A reliable man who had seen a lot. He was also convinced that Seier was… innocent. Obviously, that was fuel for Alvhild’s fire. She didn’t give in and went back to her superiors.”

“Hang on.”

Isak stopped. He nodded toward Kristiane, who had been joined by an enormous Bernese mountain dog. The child put her arms around the animal’s neck and whined. The dog growled lazily.

“You should get a dog,” he said quietly. “Kristiane is fantastic with dogs. I think it’s good for her to be with them.”

“Or you could,” retorted Johanne. “Why is it me who always has to carry the load? Always!”

He took a deep breath and slowly let it out through the gap between his front teeth, a low, extended whistling sound that made the dog prick its ears. Kristiane laughed loudly.

“Forget it,” he said, shaking his head. “Then what happened?”

“You’re not really interested.”