Anne Holt: Punishment aka What Is Mine

She lifted her cup. It was empty. Johanne waved to the waiter for a refill. The waiter was getting annoyed; Unni Kongsbakken had to ask twice for more milk before he brought some.

“Geir was unconscious,” she said in the end. “And Asbjørn was like a clam. It only took a minute or two before Geir came to. And then he was as silent as his brother. I went to get Astor. As I said, he was sitting in his study and it was quite late.”

Again she got that faraway look in her eyes, as if she was trying to turn back time.

“Astor was furious. First because I had disturbed him, of course, and then because of what I had to say. It was ludicrous, he shouted. Garbage. Bullshit, he shouted at me. He commanded the boys down to the sofa and bombarded them with questions. Neither of them said a word. They… they simply didn’t answer anything. For me, that was as good an answer as any. Even though Asbjørn was a rebel, he always had a kind of respect for his father. I had never seen him like that before. The boy looked his father defiantly in the eye and did not answer. Geir stared down into his lap. He was silent, too, even when Astor slapped him hard. In the end, Astor gave up. He sent them to bed. It was well past midnight. He was shaking when he got into bed beside me. I told him what I thought. That Geir had killed Hedvig and that he’d called Asbjørn to help him get rid of… the body. We only had one phone in the house and it was right outside Asbjørn’s room. Geir could have called him in the night without us hearing it. That’s what I said. Astor said nothing; he just cried silently. I had never seen my husband cry. Finally he said that I was wrong. That it wasn’t possible. Aksel Seier had killed Hedvig, and that was that. He turned his back to me and said no more. I didn’t give in. I went through everything again. The bloody sweater. The boys’ peculiar behavior. The evening that Hedvig disappeared, Geir had been at a Young Socialists’ meeting in Oslo. Asbjørn was at home. In the early hours I heard… sorry, I’ve already told you that. I’m repeating myself. But Astor wouldn’t listen. When the day finally dawned, he got up. He took a shower, got dressed, and went to work. From what I read in the papers, he gave an impassioned speech. Then he came home and we ate dinner in silence. All four of us.”

Unni Kongsbakken slapped her hand lightly on the table, as if punctuating her speech with a period.

“I don’t quite know what to say to all this,” said Johanne.

“Strictly speaking, you don’t need to say anything.”

“But Anders Mohaug, it was him who…”

“Anders had also changed. I hadn’t noticed it earlier; the boy was always a bit strange. But then, after that evening, I noticed that he was also quieter. More stooped. More anxious, somehow. It wasn’t hard to imagine why Asbjørn had presumably taken Anders with him. He was a very big boy, you see. Strong. I tried to talk to Mrs. Mohaug when the opportunity arose. She was like a frightened animal. Didn’t want to talk.”

Unni Kongsbakken’s eyes filled again. Her tears followed a line along the base of her nose. She licked her upper lip lightly.

“She obviously thought that Anders had done it on his own,” she said quietly. “I should have been more insistent. I should have… Mrs. Mohaug was never herself again after that winter.”

“When Anders died,” Johanne ventured, but was interrupted again.

“Astor and I never talked about the Hedvig case after that fateful night. It was as if that entire terrible night was shut away in a drawer, locked away, and hidden forever; I… As time passed, it was as if nothing had ever happened. Geir became a lawyer like his father. He tried to be like Astor in every way, without ever succeeding. Asbjørn started to write his books. In other words, there were plenty of other things to worry about.”

She gave a deep sigh; her voice trembled before she pulled herself together.

“One day, it must have been sometime in summer, in 1965, Astor came home from the office… Yes, he was working for the Ministry at the time.”

“Yes, I knew that.”

“His good friend, the general director, Einar Danielsberg, had been to see him. Asked him about the Hedvig case and Aksel Seier. Some new information had come to light that might indicate that…”

She put her face in her hands. Her wedding ring, thin and worn, was embedded in her right ring finger. It had nearly disappeared under a fold in her skin.

“Astor just said that everything had been taken care of,” she said in a still voice. “That there was no need to be frightened.”

“To be frightened?”

“That was all he said. I don’t know what happened.”

Suddenly she revealed her face again.

“Astor was an honorable man. The fairest man I have ever met. But he still let an innocent man go to prison. That said something. It taught me that…”

She took a deep breath, nearly gasped.

“We will do anything for what is ours. That’s the way we are made, we humans. We protect what is ours.”

Then she got up, an old, old lady, heavy and slow. Her hair had fallen from the Japanese chopsticks. Her eyes were swollen.

“As I’m sure you understand, I could never prove anything.”

It was as if her bag had grown too heavy in the course of the afternoon. She tried to put it on her shoulder, but it just slid down. In the end she clasped the bag with both arms and tried to straighten her back.

“That has comforted me for a long time. I couldn’t be certain about anything. The boys would never talk. The sweater was burned. Astor made sure of that. When Asbjørn died, I read his books for the first time. In The Fall of Man, the Fourteenth of November, I finally found the certainty I needed.”

I can understand that you’ve protected your husband, thought Johanne, and tried to find words that would not offend. But now you’re betraying your own son. You’re surrendering your own son. After all these years… your own son. Why?

“Geir has had over forty years of freedom,” said Unni Kongsbakken in a dull voice. “He has had forty years that did not belong to him. I think he has… I assume that he hasn’t done anything else.”

Her smile was full of shame, as if she couldn’t believe what she was saying.

“I couldn’t say anything earlier. Astor would… Astor would never have survived it. It was bad enough with Asbjørn. With those awful books, all the clamor, the suicide.”

She sighed weakly.

“Thank you for taking the time to listen to me. You’ll have to decide for yourself what you want to do with what you now know. I have done my bit. Too late, of course, but all the same… you will have to decide what happens to Geir. Presumably you can’t do much. He will of course deny everything. And as nothing can be proven… But it could perhaps help this… Aksel Seier. To know what happened, I mean. Goodbye.”

Johanne watched her bent back as she made her way to the large doors of the Grand Café, and it struck her that the colors in her jacket seemed to have faded. It was as much as the old woman could do to lift her feet. Through the windows, she saw someone help her into a taxi. A hairbrush fell out of her bag as the door closed; Johanne sat and followed the car with her eyes as it drove Unni Kongsbakken away.

The brush was full of dead hair. Johanne was surprised by how clear they were, even at that distance. They were gray and reminded her of Aksel Seier.

Adam Stubo was sitting alone in his office, trying to suppress an inappropriate feeling of relief.