Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

We wheeled the bins back into the yard. The lady on the balcony was gone.

‘She’s inside calling the boss,’ I said.

‘He’s not up,’ said Pijus. ‘Not yet.’ He looked up the facade, nodding, his lips moving as though he was counting something. ‘Come on, Ivar.’

I followed Pijus out and over to the entrance to the block, where he stood and studied the list of residents’ names.

‘Second floor, second door on the right,’ he muttered, and rang the bell. Waited, looking at me with that little smile, but it wasn’t quite so annoying this time.

A voice crackled over the speakerphone. ‘Hello?’ said a piercing voice.

‘Good morning, fru Malvik,’ said Pijus, sounding like he was trying to imitate someone. Someone who spoke better Norwegian than he did. ‘My name is Iversen, I’m from the Oslo police. We’ve just had a call from the Oslo city sanitation services. They’re reporting an incident involving indecent exposure by someone on the second floor. Since we were on patrol in the area we’ve been asked to look into it. I am aware that there are several people living on the second floor, but let me ask you first: is this something you have any knowledge of, fru Malvik?

There was a long pause.

‘Fru Malvik?’

‘No. No, I don’t know anything about that.’

‘No? Well, in that case I won’t trouble you any further for the time being.’

There was a scraping sound as the woman hung up her entryphone and Pijus looked at me. We hurried out to the truck so the woman wouldn’t have time to look out her window into the street and see that it was us. We didn’t start laughing until we were up and driving. And then I laughed so hard I cried.

‘Something wrong, Ivar?’ asked Pijus, who had stopped laughing a long time ago.

‘Just hung-over,’ I said as I wiped my nose on my sleeve. ‘No way is that woman gonna call the boss now.’

‘No,’ said Pijus, stopping outside the 7-Eleven where we usually bought a coffee and took our first smoke break.

‘One question,’ I said, after I’d bought a large coffee and poured half of it into the extra paper cup I’d taken and handed it to Pijus. ‘If you can imitate someone who speaks better Norwegian than yourself, why don’t you do it all the time?’

Pijus blew on his coffee, but still pulled a face as he took the first swig.

‘Because I’m just imitating.’

‘Well, we all do that,’ I said. ‘That’s how we learn to speak.’

‘True,’ said Pijus. ‘So I don’t know. Because it feels fake, maybe. Phoney. As if it’s a deception. I’m a Latvian who has learned Norwegian, and that’s what I want to sound like, not like an impostor. If I speak so well you believe I am Norwegian, and then make some little phonetic or grammatical mistake that lets me down, then consciously or unconsciously people are going to feel they’ve been tricked and they won’t trust me any more. See? Best just to relax and speak my own version of New Norwegian.’

I nodded. That’s what they called it at work. Not to be confused with the actual New Norwegian people in the country districts of Norway speak, but a catch-all term covering all that Kebab-Norwegian, Norwenglish, Russian-Norwegian and all the rest of that weird jabberwock the immigrant workers here speak.

‘Why did you really come to Norway?’ I asked.

We’d be working together for nearly a year now and it was the first time I’d asked. Well, sure, I had asked before, but the difference this time was that really. I was asking for something more than the standard response, about the money being better, that it was hard even to find a job where he came from. Which was probably true, but not necessarily the whole truth. So this was the first time I’d asked out of genuine interest.

He didn’t answer immediately. ‘I had affairs with some of my patients.’ Took a deep breath and, as though wanting to make sure I didn’t get too alarmed, added: ‘Female patients. They opened themselves to their psychologist, they were vulnerable, and I exploited that.’

‘Not good,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Some of them were lonely and unhappy. But so was I, my wife had just died from cancer. I didn’t manage to resist the invitations from these women. We needed each other.’

‘So what was the problem?’

‘In the first place, a psychologist is not allowed to have romantic liaisons with his patients, no matter what his civil status. And in the second place, some of the women were married.’

‘Oh, I see ...’ I said slowly.

He glanced over at me. ‘Someone talked,’ he said. ‘It came out and I was dismissed. I could always have got myself another job, for example lecturing at the university in Riga. But some of the husbands didn’t think they’d had enough revenge and hired a couple of Siberians to make sure I ended up in a wheelchair. One of the women warned me and I had no choice but to get out. Latvia is a small country.’

‘So you’re the type who burns the candle at both ends and then lays the blame for it all on a tragic tale.’

‘Yes,’ said Pijus. ‘I’m the bad version of a bad person, the kind who makes excuses for his own sleazy behaviour. If you look at it like that you’re a better person than me, Ivar.’

‘Oh?’

‘Your self-contempt is more honest than mine.’

I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about and concentrated on my coffee.

‘So who is it your wife’s been cheating on you with?’ he asked and I spluttered coffee all over the dashboard. The pressure in the head came straight back. ‘Easy now,’ he said. ‘Use your frontal lobe. That will tell you that I’m here to help. And that the best thing you can do is tell me. Remember, I’ve sworn an oath of confidentiality.’

‘Confidentiality!’ I said, the coffee cup in my hand trembling.

‘All psychologists have to.’

‘I know that, but you aren’t my shrink.’

‘Well, yes, I am not,’ said Pijus as he handed me the roll of paper we always kept between the seats.

I wiped the coffee from my hands, my chin, the dashboard. Crumpled the paper into a ball and hissed between my teeth. ‘Her boss at work. Nasty bastard. Ugly too. Trash, the whole man.’

‘So you know him?’

‘No.’ What the hell had I just said? That Lisa had been cheating on me with her boss at the sorting office? Had she? Was that what we had quarrelled about?

‘Never met him?’ asked Pijus.

‘No. Or actually yes. Or...’ I thought about it. Lisa had talked a lot about Ludvigsen, so much that I perhaps just had the feeling of having met him. Her new boss praised her for the job she was doing, something her old boss never did. And Lisa bloomed. She’d always been susceptible to flattery, so desperate for it you had to keep it under control so she didn’t get used to a level that was impossible for a husband or a boss to sustain. But Ludvigsen had just piled it on, and I’d probably thought that he wasn’t doing it just to inspire the workers. Besides being a lot sweeter than I could remember her being, Lisa had got herself a new, short hairdo, taken off a few kilos and stayed out late in the evenings going to all sorts of different cultural things with friends I didn’t even know she had. It was as though she’d suddenly got a life from which I was excluded, and that was probably why I checked her mobile phone. And found a message from this Ludvigsen. Or Stefan, which was how Lisa had him listed in her Contacts.

And so I sat there and told Pijus about it.

‘What did it say in the message?’ asked Pijus.

‘I MUST see you again.’

‘With the stress on must?’

‘In capital letters.’

‘Other messages?’

‘No.’