Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

That night I dreamed a strange dream.

Peter and I shared a room in one of the little hotels in old town, and the voices and laughter from the restaurants on the pedestrian street just below our open window, along with all the other street sounds and Peter’s steady breathing from the bed on the other side of the room, mingled together and wove the stuff of which dreams are made.

I was — not surprisingly — underwater and had my arms around something I thought was a person, but when it opened its eyes I found myself looking into a pair of dark, bloodshot fish-eyes, like the ones Peter had been looking at on the fish counter outside the restaurant where we had eaten earlier in the evening. He had told me how the eyes told you most of what you needed to know about the fish we chose, but he was careful to squeeze the body, to get some idea of how fresh it was and its fat content, and then scrape his fingernail across the skin, because it seems that if they’re factory fish, the scales flake off when you do that. Peter had taught me all sorts of elementary things about restaurant food such as this, and about wine too. Before meeting him it had never struck me that the background from which I came wasn’t a particularly cultured one. I mean, in my family home we knew plenty about the latest trends in art, music, film and literature; but when it came to the classics and drama — which Peter had systematically made his way through since the age of twelve — he was way ahead of me. He could quote long passages from Shakespeare and Ibsen, although sometimes he showed a lack of understanding of their content and meaning. It was as though he employed the methodology of science to dissect even the most intensely emotional and aesthetically advanced texts.

I jumped when I saw the girl’s fish-eyes; and as that slippery fish-body glided out of my arms, and she swam down into the darkness beneath us, I saw that the bathing cap was not pink but red.

I was woken by a light that came and went, as though someone were playing a torch back and forth across my eyelids. When I opened my eyes I saw that it was sunlight slipping between the curtains as they swayed in the morning breeze.

I got up, feeling the cool of the wooden floor against my feet in the large, sparsely furnished room, and pulled on my trousers and a T-shirt as I spoke to Peter’s motionless back in the other bed.

‘Breakfast time. You coming?’

The grunted reply suggested the after-effects of the wine the previous evening. Peter had no head for alcohol, or at any rate tolerated it worse than me.

‘Want me to bring you something?’

‘A double espresso,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘I love you.’

I emerged into the sunshine and found an open pavement restaurant which, to my surprise, offered a good breakfast, unlike the usual tasteless Eurocrap you get in tourist joints.

I glanced through a Basque newspaper someone had left behind, looking maybe for some mention of the heroics on the beach the previous day, but since Basque is a language unlike any other I couldn’t make out a word of it. Maybe Kyrgyz was too? Because that’s what it would be called, wouldn’t it? Kyrgyz or something like that? On the other hand, people say Pakistani, they don’t say Pakis. Once I’d thought all this through without reaching any conclusion, eaten my breakfast and got a triple espresso to go in a paper cup, I returned to the hotel.

As I let myself into the room and put the cup down on the table beside Peter’s empty bed I noticed that the rug on the floor was gone.

‘Where’s the rug?’ I called in the direction of the bathroom where I could hear the unmistakable sound of Peter brushing his teeth. In case it contained the secret to white teeth, I had once considered making a closer study of his technique.

‘Had to chuck it out, I puked up on it,’ I heard from the bathroom.

Peter appeared in the doorway. And he did indeed look terrible. His face was grey, as though his tan had been washed off with chlorine, and there was a hint of dark rings around both eyes. He looked ten years older than the euphoric boy who had declared himself to be in love for the first time only a day earlier.

‘Was it the wine?’

He shook his head. ‘The fish.’

‘Really?’ I checked, but my own stomach seemed in good shape. ‘Think you’ll be better by this evening?’

Peter made a face. ‘I don’t know.’

We had booked the table at the Arzak four months ago. It had been a last-minute thing. We’d downloaded the menu and on the train through Europe eagerly planned our meal from start to finish in several different versions. It’s no exaggeration to say I’d been really looking forward to it.

‘You look as though you’ve just died,’ I said. ‘Come on, Lazarus, don’t let a bit of rotten fish—’

‘It’s not only the fish,’ he said. ‘Miriam’s mother just called.’

The serious expression on his face wiped the smile off mine.

‘Apparently things aren’t going as well as expected and she asked me to come to the hospital. No one there understands a word of Russian.’

‘Miriam? Is she...?’

‘I don’t know, Martin. But I’ve got to go over there at once.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No,’ he said firmly as he stuck his bare feet into the kind of soft loafers people from his end of our town usually wore.

‘No?’

‘They only let visitors in one at a time, so they asked me to come alone. I’ll call you when I know more.’

I was left standing in the middle of the floor, on the pale rectangle left by the rug, wondering whether he meant more about Miriam, or about our restaurant visit.

On my way out I saw the end of the rolled-up rug sticking out of a rubbish bin in the parking space behind the hotel. Thought of the stink of puked-up fish and hurried on by. I spent the day wandering aimlessly through the streets of San Sebastián. It was clearly a town for the rich. Not the Russian vulgarians, the importunate Arabs, the bellowing Americans or the smug nouveau riche from my own country. It was a town for those who take their wealth for granted, knowing at the same time that they are privileged. Who are neither proud nor ashamed of their position, who feel the need neither to hide nor to display the fact that they are wealthy. They drive cars that look like other people’s cars and, in case you’re interested, cost twice as much. In San Sebastián and other holiday towns they live in a kind of shabby, relaxed elegance in large summer houses hidden behind tall hedges, with rusting wrought-iron gates and facades that look as if they could use another coat of paint. Their clothes look comfortable and, to the uninitiated, nondescript, yet they have a discreet and timeless stylishness, bought in shops that Peter knows about, and can’t understand that I don’t, and that anyway I couldn’t afford. The upper class can know a lot about the working class and the poor, and feel a deep fascination for them, especially if they can boast of great-grandparents who started out there. But they are often wholly ignorant of the upper-middle classes, those who are so keen to gain a foothold on the ladder that leads up to their own class. They’re like city dwellers ignorant of even the most elementary aspects of life in their own immediate vicinity but fully conversant with all that is remote and exotic.

I walked through San Sebastián’s broad streets, hearing the voices around me speaking Spanish, Basque, French and something that was possibly Catalan. But no Nordic languages. So I moved through the town as an outsider, the same way I had moved through Peter’s social circle. His friends treated me with a courteous friendliness and hospitality and held open the doors to rooms they pretended not to know I had no right to enter.