Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘Don’t you?’

I looked at her again. ‘You looked different on the beach. Your eyes were closed.’

‘Not on the beach,’ she said.

‘Si, señor?’

I looked up and ordered two espressos, with a quick glance at Miriam to check the order.

‘Triple,’ she said.

‘Mine too.’

The waiter disappeared.

‘Why this place in particular?’ she said.

‘I ate breakfast here. Peter and I stayed over there.’ I pointed to the guest house on the far side of the square. Saw that the window of our room on the fourth floor was closed.

Miriam turned. ‘Wow, it looks nice. How was the breakfast?’

‘Breakfast?’

‘I love breakfasts. Unfortunately it looks like they’re the same wherever you go in Europe. At least, they are in the towns we’ve visited. Expensive and taste of nothing.’

I nodded. ‘It’s good here. The coffee is too.’

She was still looking over at the guest house, giving me the chance to study her more closely. The neck, the throat. The shoulders, which were bony and reminded me of a skinny cat.

‘Was it expensive to stay there?’ she asked.

‘No, it’s cheap. At least, considering where it is. But the rooms are simple.’

‘Simple is fine.’ She turned to face me again. ‘Mamma and I are looking for somewhere cheaper than where we’re staying now.’

Yes, I thought. Simple is fine.

‘Do you work as a model?’ I asked.

‘Wow,’ she said, and rolled her eyes.

I laughed. ‘Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a corny pickup line. Do you want to know why I ask?’

‘Because I’m skinny?’

‘Because you walk like a model, and that’s not an especially efficient way of moving from point A to point B.’

‘So a bit like my swimming then.’

‘And because models often dress badly. Not badly as in tasteless, but it’s as though they want to show the world that they really don’t care about appearances and all that superficial stuff. And also — of course — that they can make even boring clothes look good.’

‘Are you implying that my dress doesn’t look good?’

‘Well, what do you think?’

‘I think you’re trying a bit too hard to convince me you’re intelligent and interesting.’

‘Apart from the too hard bit, how am I doing?’

The sun had discovered a gap in the clouds and she blinked her eyes shut and conjured up a pair of large sunglasses.

‘As models, when we’re at work we’re forced to wear so many outfits that are uncomfortable to walk in that in our free time we prefer comfort to the wow factor. But of course we’re also hoping the garment we bought at the flea market or took from Grandma’s wardrobe will become the latest fashion after we’ve worn it.’

‘Nice try, but now I know you’re not a model.’

She laughed. ‘I’m not?’

‘You didn’t get out your sunglasses to hide the fact that you were lying, but once you had them on it seemed like a good idea to take the opportunity to do so.’

She placed her elbows on the edge of the small, round and unsteady metal table, supporting her chin in her palms, and smiled at me. ‘Now you seem a bit smart and interesting.’

‘Do you often lie?’

She shrugged. ‘Not often, but it happens. What about you?’

‘Same here.’

‘You lie to friends and girlfriends?’

‘That’s two different questions.’

She laughed. ‘True enough. Friends, then?’

I thought of Peter. About the fact that I had travelled in secret to San Sebastián, contacted Miriam and was now sitting here with her. If I had wanted to meet her, all I had to do was ask him for her number. Not that I would have got it. But he had lied, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to lie a bit too?

‘Always,’ I said.

‘Always?’

‘I’m kidding. It’s one of Socrates’ paradoxes. About the man from Crete who says that Cretans lie all the time. Ergo it can’t be true that all—’

‘It wasn’t Socrates who said that, it was Epimenides.’

‘Oh? Are you calling me a liar?’

She didn’t laugh, just gave a slight groan. And from the way my ears were burning I knew I was blushing.

‘So what are you then?’ I asked.

‘Student.’

‘History? Philosophy?’

‘And English. A bit of everything. And nothing.’

She sighed, pulled out a shawl and tied it round her head the way her mother had worn it, though it looked as though Miriam was doing it to keep her hair under control. ‘And refugee.’

‘What are you fleeing from?’

The sun vanished again, and the next gust of wind was immediately cooler.

‘A man,’ she said.

‘Tell me about it.’

The waiter put our coffee cups down in front of us. She took off her sunglasses and stared down into hers.

Miriam described how she had grown up with her parents in Almaty in Kazakhstan. I could remember my father talking about Almaty — or Alma-Ata as it was called in those days — and world skating records set thanks to the thin air and the special angle at which the wind came down from the mountains that meant you had it at your back all the way round the track. Miriam’s father had been in the oil business, and they had been members of the new financial upper class in that large and sparsely populated land.

‘Corruption and censorship, a dictator who renames the capital city after himself, the biggest country in the world without a coastline. And yet we were happy there. Up until the time my father disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘He’d threatened to blow the whistle on some Americans who got hold of oil rights by bribing government officials. I can remember him saying I should be careful about what I said on the phone. And then one day he didn’t come home from work. We were told nothing, and we never heard from him again. My mother noticed how the privileges we used to enjoy started disappearing one by one, and we had to move from the house because they said it belonged to the oil company. We set off on what I thought was a holiday to Kyrgyzstan, where my mother’s family come from, but we never returned home.’

Miriam described Kyrgyzstan as a more beautiful but poorer version of Kazakhstan. And more open. ‘At least people weren’t afraid to say something bad about the dictator,’ she laughed. But more old-fashioned too, even in the capital, Bishkek. For example, ala kachuu, bride-kidnapping, was practised there. Even though it was officially against the law, people reckoned that a third of all marriages came about because the husband had kidnapped his future wife and he and his family forced her to marry him.

‘Mamma’s family had money. Not a lot, but enough to enable me to study in Moscow. And each time I came back home to Mamma, the life in Kyrgyzstan seemed more and more... far away. It’s so...’ She threw open her hands. Long, slender fingers with bitten nails. ‘You know, a lot of people in Kazakhstan want to get rid of the “stan” ending, because they don’t want to be associated with that type of land. Like these oligarchs who try to disguise their country accents. Well, in Kyrgyzstan they don’t even try, people are just so smug and satisfied with who they are. I’d got used to all the comments from the men in the streets — I ignored them — and I hadn’t even noticed this one little guy who just stood there at the bar staring when me and my cousins had a drink at the hotel bar. Then one evening as we were on our way in as usual two men grabbed me while two others held my cousins back and I was dragged away to a car and driven off.’

I could see she was trying to tell me all this in a matter-of-fact way, as though it was just a curious and even comical story, but the slight tremor in her voice betrayed her.