Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

By the time I had descended the rear of the crag and walked round to the front the two other climbers had gone. I could see them walking along the path through the fields. Clouds were moving in from the west.

‘You idiot,’ hissed Monique, who stood there with her rucksack on her back ready to leave.

‘I love you too,’ I said and took off my shoes. ‘Your turn, Trevor.’

He stared at me in disbelief.

In fiction great narrative power is often vested in a single look. In a literary sense the convention helps the writer tell his story well, and sometimes to great effect. But since I am not, as I have said, a specialist in the interpretation of body language, or more sensitive to atmosphere than others, I can only conclude, based on what he did, that he knew. He knew that I knew. And that this would be his way of doing penance; to challenge death, in the same way as I had just done. That this was now the only way he could show his respect for me and have any hope of my forgiveness.

‘You won’t make your idiotic action any less idiotic by persuading him to do something just as idiotic!’ hissed Monique. There were tears in her eyes. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hear the rest of her tirade. I stared at those tears and wondered if they were for me. For us. Or were they for the moral trap she and Trevor had fallen into, which was so contrary to everything she thought she stood for? Or for the knife that was about to be plunged into me, and which seemed to call for more courage than they possessed? But after a while I stopped thinking about that too.

And when Monique realised I was no longer listening and that I was no longer looking at her but at something behind and now above her she turned, and saw Trevor on his way up the crag. She screamed. But Trevor was beyond the point at which he could regret it and turn back. Beyond the point at which I could regret it.

No, that’s not true. I could have warned him. Tried to get him to find another way, look for other handholds that would get him past the crux. I could have. Did I consider it? I don’t remember. I know I thought it, but did I think it then, or later? What hoops has my memory jumped through, in order to if not exonerate me then at least offer me extenuating circumstances? Again, I don’t know. And which pain would be the greater? The one I would have to live with if Trevor had travelled to France that summer and maybe spent the rest of his life with Monique? Or the one I was fated to live with — to lose both of them anyway? And would any of those pains have been worse than to have lived with Monique, lived a lie, lived in denial, knowing that our marriage was false and based not on mutual love but on mutual guilt? That its foundation stone was the gravestone of the man she had loved more than me?

I could have warned him but I didn’t.

Because back then I would have chosen the same as I would today — to live a life of lies, denial and guilt with her. And had I known there and then that such a thing was impossible I would have wished that it were me who had fallen. But I didn’t. I had to live on. Until today.

I remember little of the rest of that day. Meaning that it is, of course, archived somewhere, but in a drawer I never opened.

What I do remember is something from the drive back to Oxford. It’s night, and several hours since Trevor’s body has been brought down, since Monique and I have given our statements to the police and tried to explain to Trevor’s distraught mother while his father’s sobs of pain cut through the air.

I’m driving, Monique is silent, we’re on the M1 somewhere between Nottingham and Leicester. The temperature had plummeted with the coming of rain, so I’ve turned on the seat warmers and windscreen wipers, thinking that now it will all have been washed away, the proof against me on the crux. And in the warm interior Monique suddenly says she can smell perfume, and from the corner of my eye I see her turning towards me and glancing down into my lap. ‘You’ve got something white on the inside of your thigh.’

‘Resin,’ I say quickly, without taking my eyes off the road. As though I had known she would point this out and had my explanation ready.

We drove the rest of the way in silence.

‘You killed your best friend,’ said Franz Schmid.

The tone was neither shocked nor accusing. He was simply stating a fact.

‘Now you know as much about me as I know about you,’ I said.

He looked up at me. A breath of wind lifted his quiff. ‘And you think that means I’ve nothing to fear from you. But your crime is beyond the statute of limitations now. You can’t be punished for it.’

‘Don’t you think I’ve been punished, Franz?’ I closed my eyes. It didn’t really matter if he let go of the rope or not, I had made my confession. Naturally he couldn’t give me any kind of absolution. But he could — we could — give each other a story that said that we were not alone, not the only sinner. It doesn’t make it forgivable, but it makes it human. Turns it into a human failing. The failure is always human. And that at least makes me human. And Franz too. Did he understand that? That I had come to turn him into a human being? And myself too? That I was his rescuer, and he mine? I opened my eyes again. Looked at his hand.

By the time we headed back down it was so dark that Franz had to go first with me coming along close behind. As I concentrated on following in his footsteps along the narrow, steep track I heard the surf muttering and snorting beneath us, like a beast of prey disappointed that its prey has got away.

‘Careful here,’ said Franz, although I still stumbled against the large loose rock he had stepped over. I heard it rolling down the mountainside but said nothing. An optician once told me that among the most predictable statistics regarding the human body is that by the time we’re approaching sixty our eyes have lost something like twenty-five of their sensitivity to light. So my sight was worse now. But it could also be that my sight was better now. At the very least I understood my own story better. We walked on, and as we rounded the point I saw the lights from the houses down on the beach.

Franz got me down from Where Eagles Dare by using his feet and the rock face to approach a little closer to the first bolt, at the same time hauling in enough rope to enable him to grab it and tied a knot in the end. With a bit of scrabbling and swinging I managed to scramble onto the protruding lip of the ledge just as the last of the daylight faded.

As soon as we reached the turning circle and were inside the car Franz called Helena.

‘We’re both fine, darling, the climbing just took a little longer than expected,’ he said. Pause. A smile spread over his face. ‘Tell him Daddy will be home soon and I’ll read to him. Tell him I love you both.’

I looked out to sea. Sometimes it seems as though life is full of impossible choices. But perhaps that’s because we don’t recognise the easy choices as choices. It is the dilemmas, the unmarked crossroads that occupy our thoughts. At Oxford, in a discussion about Robert Frost’s famous poem ‘The Road Not Taken’, I once maintained, not without a certain youthful arrogance, that the poem was clearly in praise of individualism, advice to us young to take ‘the one less travelled by’ because ‘that has made all the difference’, as the poet says in the final two lines. But our sixty-year-old professor smiled and said it was precisely this kind of naive, optimistic misunderstanding that has dragged Robert Frost’s poem down to the level of Khalil Gibran and Paulo Coelho and made it so beloved of the masses. That the poem’s weakness is the final verse, because it is ambivalent and can be read as a failed attempt to sum up what the rest of the poem is actually about; that you must choose. That you know nothing of the road, not even which of them is ‘less travelled by’ since, according to the poem, these seem to be the same as far as the eye can see. And that you won’t even know where the one you didn’t take leads to. Because — as the poet says — the road you travel leads to new roads and will never return to this particular crossroads. Therein lies the poetry, our professor maintained. The melancholy. The poem is not about the road you took, but about the one you didn’t take.