Anne Holt - 1222

But where had they gone, all these members of the royal family?

Sometimes I realize a little more clearly than usual why I would prefer not to have anything to do with other people.

Her voice was characteristic, bordering on parody.

It is said that opinions in themselves are never dangerous. I’m not so sure.

Whether it is Kari Thue’s views or her missionary zeal that frighten me most it’s difficult to say. At any rate, she is still very adept. She could play the main character in a play by Holberg, with her absurd logic, her way of distorting the facts, and her impressive belief in her own message. Besides which, she has such a bloody high profile. She’s everywhere: on the television, on the radio, in the papers. Kari Thue frightens nervous people into becoming aggressive, and seduces otherwise sensible men into insanity. The woman with a voice as sharp as the parting in her thin hair had already started a quarrel. There were two Muslims at Finse this afternoon; a man and a woman. Kari Thue is a bloodhound of note, and she had scented the problem long ago.

‘I’m not talking to you,’ she almost screamed, and I just had to open my eyes a fraction. ‘I’m talking to her!’

A short man with an enormous beard was trying to position himself between Kari Thue and a woman to whom he was married, judging by appearances. She was wearing dark, full-length clothes and a headscarf; she was the person the priest had tried to drag along to his prayer meeting in the hobby room, in his confusion. I presumed they were Kurds. They could of course just as easily have been Iranians, Iraqis, or even Italian Muslims, when it came down to it, but I still settled on Kurds. Ever since I got to know Nefis, who is a Turk, I have become pretty good at noticing details that I can’t define, strictly speaking, but which mean I rarely get it wrong. The woman was weeping, hiding her face in her hands.

‘There, you see!’ shouted Kari Thue. ‘You’ve -’

The priest wearing the Brann scarf, who was at least as well known from television as Thue herself, moved towards them.

‘Let’s all just calm down, shall we,’ he intoned, placing a calming hand on the shoulder of the agitated Kurdish man. ‘My name is Cato Hammer. We should all be friends and have some consideration for each other in a situation like -’

He ran his other hand down Kari Thue’s back. She reacted as if he had been anointing her with sulphuric acid, and turned around so fast that she almost dropped the little rucksack she carried over one shoulder.

‘Get off!’ she hissed. ‘Don’t touch me!’

He removed his hand at once.

‘I really do think you need to calm down a little,’ he said in a fatherly tone.

‘This has nothing to do with you,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to conduct a conversation with this woman!’

She was so preoccupied with the genial priest that the Kurd seized his chance. With a firm grip on his wife’s arm he hurried away from the reception desk and disappeared in the direction of the stairs, where a sign carved in wood announced that you were now entering St Paal’s Bar.

I don’t like priests. I dislike them and imams in equal measure, although I haven’t actually come across many of the latter. I did once meet a rabbi who was quite decent, but that was in New York. On the whole I have little time for religion, and particularly for those who act as stewards for various religious beliefs. I find priests the most difficult of all to tolerate. Naturally, they are also the ones I am most accustomed to. And I react against priests like Cato Hammer most strongly of all. They preach a theology of tolerance where the boundaries between right and wrong are so vague that I cannot see the point of having a religion at all. They smile piously and open their arms wide. They love everyone. Sometimes I suspect that priests like Cato Hammer don’t believe in God at all. Instead they are in love with a Jesus cliché, the good man in sandals with the velvety gaze and welcoming hands. Suffer little children to come unto me. I just can’t cope with it at all. I don’t want to be embraced. I want sulphurous sermons and threats of eternal flames. Give me priests and bishops with straight backs and burning eyes, give me implacability and condemnation and promises of punishment on the other side. I want a church that whips its congregation onward along the straight and narrow, and makes it crystal clear to the rest of the world that we are heading for eternal damnation. At least that would make it easy to see the difference between us. And I won’t have to feel involved, something I have never asked to be.

So I didn’t like the man.

Without pre-empting events, I would still like to say at this point that the first thing I thought when I heard that Cato Hammer was dead a few hours later was that he hadn’t been such a terrible person after all, in spite of everything.

‘Don’t get so agitated,’ he said to the raging fury. ‘You create distance between people, Kari Thue. Muslims are not the same as Islamists. The world is not like that. You divide us up into -’

‘Idiot,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve never said or implied anything of the kind. You’ve fallen for the naive Norwegian political correctness that is allowing this country to be invaded by…’

I closed my ears.

If religion is, as I believe, basically a scourge for mankind, then I still see no logic, not to mention decency, in arranging believers in some kind of rank order. Religion comprises tyranny and civilization, rejection and conformity, love and oppression. And why Islam in particular should be regarded as worse than other faiths is beyond my comprehension. But it is not beyond Kari Thue’s comprehension. She is the leader of a movement that reserves the right to stand up for all women, children, foetuses and everything else that forms part of ‘Norwegian values’.

I am allergic to the word ‘values’.

Combined with the concept ‘Norwegian’, it becomes utterly loathsome. In her fanatical desire to strike back at the ‘Islamic world threat’, Kari Thue and her increasingly numerous and terrifyingly influential campaigns are making life very difficult for hard-working, well-integrated Norwegian Muslims.

The other feeling that struck me several hours later when I heard about the death was therefore a sense of annoyance that it wasn’t Kari Thue who was lying there frozen stiff in a snowdrift instead of Cato Hammer.

But you can’t really say that sort of thing.

‘Are you asleep?’

‘No,’ I said, trying to sit up straight in my chair. ‘Well, not any more.’

I was starting to feel stiff. Despite the fact that I couldn’t feel the wound in my thigh, it had become clear that the rest of my body had also taken a considerable beating. My back was aching, one shoulder was sore and my mouth was dry. Dr Streng had pulled up a chair beside me. He offered me a glass of red wine.

‘No thanks. But a glass of water would be great.’

He disappeared for a couple of minutes.

‘Thanks,’ I said, emptying the glass in one draught.

‘Good,’ said Dr Streng. ‘It’s important to take in fluids.’

‘Definitely,’ I said, smiling stiffly.

‘Terrible weather,’ he said cheerfully.

I don’t respond to remarks like that.

‘I tried to go out for a while,’ he went on, unabashed. ‘Just to feel the cold, that’s all. It’s impossible! It’s not just that there’s a hurricane blowing, they say the snow is worse than anyone up here has seen before. It’s piled high against the walls and windows, and the temperature is down to minus twenty-six, and with the wind-chill factor it’s going to feel…’

He thought for a moment.