Anne Holt - 1222

But I do have breathing difficulties from time to time. And sometimes a pain like a kind of cramp stabs through the small of my back. That kind of thing. No more than bagatelles, really, but I had allowed myself to be persuaded. This American was supposed to be brilliant, after all.

So seven of the eight doctors from the train were specialists in a type of injury from which none of us was suffering. The eighth, a woman in her sixties, was a gynaecologist. Like an unexpected gift from the gods, all the doctors had got off very lightly in the accident. And even if they were in fact experts in skin and women’s reproductive organs, they were still working their way blithely through cuts and broken bones.

I myself was taken care of by the dwarf.

He couldn’t have been more than 140 centimetres tall. As if to compensate for this, he was exactly the same width. His head was far too big for his body, and his arms were even shorter, comparatively speaking, than those I had seen in persons of restricted growth before. I tried not to stare.

I stay at home most of the time. There are several reasons for this, including the fact that I can’t cope with people staring at me. Bearing in mind that I am a middle-aged woman of normal appearance in a wheelchair, and therefore should not really be of particular interest to anyone, I could only imagine what it was like for this man. I saw it immediately, as he walked towards me. Someone had placed a cushion beneath my head. I was no longer compelled to gaze up at the reindeer’s muzzle, where the fur had worn away and rough seams revealed the taxidermist’s appalling work. As the little doctor moved through the room with an odd, rolling gait, the crowd parted before him like Moses parting the Red Sea. Every conversation died away; even the complaints and cries of pain stopped as he passed by.

They just stared. I closed my eyes.

‘Mmm,’ he said, kneeling down beside me. ‘And what have we here?’

His voice was surprisingly deep. I had expected some kind of helium voice, as if he were an entertainer at a children’s party. As it would be extremely impolite not to look at the doctor when he was speaking to me, and my closed eyes might suggest that I felt worse than I actually did, I opened them.

‘Magnus Streng,’ he said, taking my reluctant right hand in a thick, stubby paw.

I mumbled my name and couldn’t help thinking that the doctor’s parents must have had a very particular sense of humour. Magnus. The Great One.

He peered at me for a moment, and raised his index finger. Then his face broke into a huge smile. ‘The policewoman,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘You were the one who got shot in Nordmarka a few years ago, weren’t you?’ Once again his face acquired an expression of exaggerated thoughtfulness. This time he placed his finger against his temple before smiling even more broadly. ‘By that corrupt chief of police, isn’t that right? It was -’

‘It was a long time ago,’ I interrupted him. ‘You have a good memory.’

He toned down the smile and concentrated on my leg. Only now did I notice that the omnipresent Geir Rugholmen had sat down next to the doctor. The snowmobile suit was gone. His woolly jumper must have dated back to the war. His bare elbows protruded through holes in both sleeves. His knee breeches had presumably been blue once upon a time, but had faded to an indefinable dark-greyish shade. The man smelled of wood smoke.

‘Where’s my chair?’ I asked.

‘The pole just slipped out,’ Geir Rugholmen said to the doctor, adjusting his plug of snuff with his tongue. ‘We weren’t going to pull it out, but we had to break it off outside the wound before we brought her here. And it… it just slipped out. But she’s not bleeding so much any more.’

‘Where’s my chair?’

‘I know we should have left the pole in,’ said Rugholmen.

‘Where’s her chair?’ asked Dr Streng, without taking his eyes off the wound; he had ripped open my trouser leg, and I had the feeling that his hands were quick and precise in spite of their size and shape.

‘Her chair? Her wheelchair? It’s on the train.’

‘I want my chair,’ I said.

‘Bloody hell, we can’t go back and…’

The doctor looked up. He fished a pair of enormous horn-rimmed spectacles out of his breast pocket, put them on, and said quietly: ‘I would very much appreciate it if someone could fetch this lady’s wheelchair. As soon as humanly possible.’

‘Have you any idea what the weather’s like out there? Are you aware -’

The index finger, no longer quite so comical, pushed the spectacles up the doctor’s nose before he fixed his gaze on Rugholmen.

‘Fetch the chair. Now. I imagine you would find it quite unpleasant if your legs were left behind on a train while you yourself were helplessly carted off. Having seen you and your excellent colleagues working out in the storm, I presume it’s a relatively simple matter to go and fetch something that is so important to our friend here.’

Once again, that big smile. I got the feeling that the man consciously made use of his handicap. As soon as you began to overlook the circus-like appearance, he made sure he resembled a clown once again. His mouth didn’t even need the traditional red paint, his lips were thick enough as they were. The whole thing was very confusing. Which must have been the intention. At any rate, Geir Rugholmen got reluctantly to his feet, mumbled something and headed for the porch, where he had left his outdoor clothes.

‘A man of the mountains,’ said Dr Streng contentedly before taking his eyes off him. ‘And this wound looks fantastic. You’ve been lucky. A good dose of antibiotics just to be on the safe side, and you’ll be fine.’

I sat up. It took him only a few seconds to bandage my thigh.

‘We really have been lucky,’ he said, tucking his spectacles back in his pocket. ‘This could have gone very badly indeed.’

I wasn’t sure whether he meant my injury, or the accident itself. He brushed the palms of his hands against each other as if I had been covered in dust. Then he waddled off to the next patient, a terrified eight-year-old boy with his arm in a temporary sling. As I tried to haul myself over to the reception desk in order to find some support for my back, a man positioned himself in the middle of the floor in the big room, his legs spread wide apart. He hesitated for a moment, then used a chair to help him jump up on top of the five- or six-metre-long rough table that was standing by the windows facing south-west. Since he was several kilos overweight, he almost fell off. When he had regained his balance, I realized who he was. Around his neck he was wearing a red and white Brann football club scarf.

‘My dear friends,’ he said in a voice that suggested he was used to speaking to large groups of people, ‘we have all suffered an extremely traumatic experience!’

He sounded absolutely delighted.

‘Needless to say, our thoughts go out to Einar Holter’s family, first and foremost. Einar was driving our train today. I didn’t know him, but I have already been told that he was a family man, a much loved -’

‘His family hasn’t yet been informed about the accident,’ a woman’s voice interrupted loudly from the other side of the room.

I couldn’t see her from where I was sitting, but I liked her immediately.

‘It’s not exactly appropriate to hold a eulogy under the circumstances,’ she went on. ‘Besides which, I think -’

‘Of course,’ said the man on the table, holding the palms of his hands up to the congregation in a gesture of resignation. ‘I merely thought it was the right moment, now that we know we are all safe and no one has been seriously injured, to remind ourselves that in our mutual rejoicing at -’