Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

I didn’t have an especially guilty conscience about not telling Carl how I felt about Mari. Mostly I was amazed he hadn’t realised it himself. I could have told him everything. I could have, and he would have understood. At any rate said he understood. Put his head on one side, given me a thoughtful look and said things like that happen, things like that pass. I knew that, and that was why I kept my mouth shut and waited for it to pass. I never asked Mari to dance again, neither metaphorically nor literally.

But Mari asked me.

It happened a few months after Grete had told Mari about her and Carl having it away, and Mari had dumped Carl. Carl had gone to Minnesota to study, and I was living alone on the farm. One day there was a knock on the door. It was Mari. She gave me a hug, pushing her breasts against my chest, wouldn’t let me go and asked if I wanted to sleep with her. ‘Will you sleep with me?’ were the words she whispered in my ear. And then added ‘Roy’. Hardly because of the research that shows that using a person’s name puts them in a more receptive frame of mind, but more to emphasise that it was me, Roy, she meant.

‘I know you want to,’ she said when she noticed my hesitation. ‘I’ve known it all along, Roy.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re mistaken.’

‘Don’t lie,’ she said, slipping her hand down between us.

I pulled myself away from her. Of course I knew why she’d come. Even though she was the one who had broken with Carl, she was the one who felt scorned. Maybe she didn’t even really want to break up but felt she had no choice. Because of course Mari Aas, the chairman’s daughter, couldn’t live with the fact that the son of a mountain farmer had been unfaithful to her, not when Grete had made sure half the village knew about it. But just to send Carl packing, as people say, wasn’t enough. The balance had to be restored. The fact that two months had passed indicated that she’d reached her decision reluctantly. In other words, if we went to bed together now it wouldn’t be a case of me exploiting a woman in a vulnerable situation after a break-up; she would be the one exploiting a brother who had just been abandoned by the person he loved most of all.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let me help you.’

I shook my head. ‘It isn’t you, Mari.’

She stopped in the middle of the floor and stared at me in disbelief. ‘So then it’s true?’

‘What’s true?’

‘What people say.’

‘Damned if I know what they say.’

‘That you’re not interested in girls. That the only things on your mind are…’ She paused. Pretended to be looking for the right words. And then Mari Aas found them: ‘…are cars and birds,’ she said.

‘I mean that the problem isn’t you, Mari. It’s Carl. I just don’t think it would be right.’

‘Correct. It wouldn’t be.’

Now I saw it too, that condescending contempt people down in the village thought she viewed them with. But there was something else, as though she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know. What had Carl said?

‘Better find some other way to take your revenge,’ I said. ‘Ask Grete for advice. She’s good on stuff like that.’

And then Mari blushed, and this time she really was lost for words. She marched out and got into her car, gravel flying behind her as she sped down towards Geitesvingen.

When I saw her in town a few days later she blushed again and pretended not to see me. It happened several times – in a village like ours it’s impossible not to bump into people. But time passed, Mari went to Oslo and studied political science, and when she came back we were able to speak to each other almost like before. Almost. Because we had lost each other. She knew what I knew, that, for her, this was like a cancerous lump inside her body: not that I had rejected her, but that I had seen her. Seen her naked. Naked and ugly.

As for cancerous lumps of my own, there was probably still one there with Mari’s name on, but it had stopped growing. I’d waited out that crush. It’s funny, but I stopped being in love with Mari at almost exactly the same time it was over between her and Carl.

TWO DAYS AFTER MY VISIT to Moe the roofer, head office called and offered me the station down in Sørlandet. They sounded disappointed when I said no thanks. They asked for a reason, so I gave them one. I said the station I was running faced some interesting challenges now that the main highway was being rerouted, and that I looked forward to getting to grips with them. They sounded impressed and said it was a pity, they really believed I was the man they needed down there.

Later that day Kurt Olsen called in at the station.

He stood, legs apart, in front of the counter, drew his index finger and thumb over his Easy Rider moustache and waited until I had finished serving a customer and the shop was empty.

‘Anton Moe has reported you for grievous bodily harm.’

‘That’s a cute choice of phrase,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ said Olsen. ‘He told me about the accusations you made, and I’ve had a chat with Natalie. She confirms that her father has never touched her.’

‘What did you expect? That she’d say yes, since you ask, my father is actually screwing me?’

‘If it was a question of rape, then I don’t doubt—’

‘Jesus, I never said it was rape. Not technically. But it’s rape all the same, you must surely see that.’

‘No.’

‘Maybe she thinks she didn’t resist enough, that she should have known it was wrong, even if she was only young when it started.’

‘Steady on now, you don’t know—’

‘Listen: kids think everything their parents do is right, OK, but she remembers too that she was told to keep it secret. So perhaps some part of her understood that it wasn’t right? And because she’s been party to the secrecy, because loyalty to the family comes before loyalty to God and the sheriff, she takes some of the blame herself. When she turns sixteen maybe it makes the burden easier to bear if she persuades herself that she was a willing participant.’

Olsen stroked his moustache. ‘Sounds like you’ve just done a course in social studies and been living over at Moe’s while you did it.’

I didn’t answer.

He sighed. ‘I can’t force a sixteen-year-old to give evidence against her father, you must realise that. On the other hand she’s old enough to take responsibility for whatever she says.’

‘So what you’re saying is, you choose to look the other way because it could be consensual and the girl is no longer legally a minor?’

‘No!’ Kurt Olsen looked round to make certain we were still alone and lowered his voice again. ‘Incest in the direct line of descent is punishable by law, regardless. Moe risks six years in jail even if the girl was thirty and it was all a hundred per cent consensual; but how can I prove anything when no one talks? All that happens if I arrest the father is a scandal that will ruin the lives of all those involved. There would be a massive investment of resources in something that wouldn’t lead to a conviction. Plus the village name would be dragged through the mud in the national newspapers.’

You forgot to add that you personally would end up with a very black mark against your name, I thought. But when I looked at Olsen I could see that the despair in his face and voice were genuine.

‘So what can you do?’ he sighed, opening his arms wide.

‘Make sure the girl gets away from her father,’ I said. ‘By moving to Notodden, for example.’

He turned his gaze away from mine. Fastened it on the newspaper stand, as though there was something of interest there. Nodded slowly.