Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

I heard shouts from the beach as I lay on my back in the water with the girl’s head on my chest and kicked out for the shore. As we reached the shallows, Peter, the lifeguard and a man who said he was a doctor waded out to us and helped her onto dry land. I lay in the shallows, coughing up water and trying to recover my strength.

‘Baywatch m-aaa-n.’

I opened my eyes. A man with a red beard and an equally red, sunburned face was looking down at me. In a rudimentary way the wide grin was equipped with teeth, the kilt was dirty, as was the blue shirt which was — unless I was mistaken — in the colours of the Scotland football team.

‘You’re a true saviour,’ he continued in his slurred but nevertheless comprehensible Scottish English as he helped me to my feet. Once we were on our feet, however, I was the one supporting him, for the man was roaring drunk.

‘Question is, can you save me, Baywatch man? I need twenty euros to get to Pamplona.’

‘I’ve got it, but I need the money myself,’ I said, which was the truth.

I looked at the crowd of people further up the beach and noticed a middle-aged woman wearing an outfit that outdid the Scotsman’s: hijab and bikini. She was standing bent over the doctor and Peter, whom I could just glimpse between the crowd of people as he knelt beside the girl. The woman alternated between sobbing and scolding, but no one seemed to be paying any attention to her. When I turned back to the Scotsman he was already on his way towards some of the other bathers. I walked over to join the crowd.

‘How is...?’

‘She’s breathing,’ said Peter without looking up at me. ‘We’re waiting for an ambulance.’

He stroked the girl’s face with his hand, partially obscuring it from me, so that all I could see was her forehead. On it, directly below her glistening black hairline, small downy tufts of soft hair that were already dry stirred in the slight breeze.

I felt a hand close around my arm and the woman in the bikini and the hijab spoke to me. It sounded Arabic, or Persian maybe, or perhaps Turkish. Or maybe I just thought that because she looked as though she came from that part of the world. Anyway, I didn’t understand a word of what she said.

‘English, please,’ I said.

‘Russkii?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

‘Daughter,’ she said and pointed to the girl. ‘Miriam.’

‘Ambulance,’ I said. She looked at me uncomprehendingly, reeled off several more words in the same foreign tongue and then squeezed my arm, as though the language barrier could be surmounted if only I concentrated hard enough.

‘Hospital,’ I tried, and mimed someone driving, but still got no response.

A distant siren sounded and faded on the breeze, and I pointed in the direction of the sound. The woman’s face lit up.

‘Aha, hospital,’ she said, though I couldn’t hear much difference from the way I had just said the word. The woman disappeared and came back carrying two bags just as the ambulance personnel came running with the stretcher from the ambulance parked in front of the line of bars. The doctor and the girl’s mother walked alongside the stretcher. Peter and I stood watching them. Then, without a word, Peter grabbed up his phone from the towel and ran over to the ambulance. And there, to my great surprise, I saw him starting to talk to the mother. He entered something on the keypad, showed it to her, and she nodded in confirmation. Then the woman kissed him on the cheek and got into the ambulance which immediately drove off, this time without the siren.

‘How did you communicate with her?’ I asked Peter when he returned.

‘I heard her ask if you spoke Russian.’

‘Do you speak Russian?’

‘A bit,’ he smiled. ‘Optional choice at my school.’

‘And you chose Russian because...?’

‘Because at least half of all the really good research being done in physics is written in Russian.’

‘Of course.’

‘They’re from Kyrgyzstan. Everyone from there over forty speaks a little Russian.’

‘Anyway, she seemed pleased you could speak it.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘She kissed you.’

Peter laughed. ‘My Russian is atrocious. From what I said she got the impression that I was the one who had rescued her daughter, and I—’

‘You?’

Peter smiled again. He was a good-looking boy, but in the course of our trip — probably owing to what was, for him, an unusually spartan diet — his face had lost some of its childish rotundity, and the muscles were visible on the suntanned body that had, until recently, been slightly chubby.

‘I didn’t correct her.’

‘Why not?’ I asked, although I already had some idea.

‘That girl’s face,’ he said, still smiling. ‘And those eyes. When she regained consciousness and opened them...’ His voice had a dreamy quality that was quite unlike the Peter I knew who had, by his own account, no time for sentimentality. ‘You should have seen her eyes, Martin.’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘She opened them for a second or two while we were under the water.’

Peter wrinkled his brow. ‘D’you think she saw you? I mean, d’you think she would recognise you as the man who saved her?’

I shook my head. ‘Faces are very different underwater. I don’t know if I would recognise her either.’

Peter turned his face up to the sun like a man who wanted to be dazzled. ‘Do you have any objection, old chap ?’

‘To what?’

‘To our pretending that I was the one who swam out to her.’

I didn’t reply, because I wasn’t sure what to answer.

‘What an idiot I am,’ said Peter, eyes closed and with that smile that seemed unwilling to leave his face. ‘What does one dream of when one swims day in and day out, year after year, knowing that one will never be a world champion? Of course — that some day one will save someone from drowning and be celebrated as a hero. Perhaps even be awarded a medal so that, one day, one can tell one’s children the story of how it was won. Am I right?’

I shrugged. ‘Somewhere deep down inside there’s probably some such stupid dream, yes.’

‘And when at last it comes true, I ask you to let me take the credit. And all because of a pair of lovely eyes. Some friend I am!’ He laughed, shaking his head. ‘I must have got a touch of sunstroke. I asked the mother for her phone number so that I could call and make sure everything turned out all right the way the doctor said it would.’

‘Jesus. You—’

‘Yes, Martin! I must see those eyes again. Those eyebrows. That forehead. Those pale lips. And that body... my God, the girl’s an absolute nymphet.’

‘Exactly. A little too young for you, maybe?’

‘Are you crazy? We’re twenty-five. Nothing is too young for us!’

‘I doubt she’s more than sixteen years old, Peter.’

‘In Kyrgyzstan they get married when they’re fourteen.’

‘You’d marry her if she was fourteen?’

‘Yes!’ He put his hands on my shoulders and shook me, as if I was the one who had gone mad. ‘I’m in love, Martin. Do you know how many times that’s happened to me?’

I thought about it. ‘Two and a half. If you’ve been telling me the truth.’

‘Never!’ he said. ‘Not that I was lying. I just thought I knew what love was. Now I know.’

‘OK then,’ I said.

‘OK then what?’

‘It’s OK, you can be the one who saved her.’

‘You mean that?’

‘Yes, and if you’ll stop shaking me and leave her alone if she’s under eighteen then we’ve got a deal.’

‘And you swear that you’ll never, never tell her, or her mother, or anyone else?’

I laughed. ‘Never,’ I said.