Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘Because “investor” sounds a lot more impressive than just “participant”. Don’t you think?’ Carl hooked his thumbs into his belt and put on a funny voice: ‘ I ain’t just a farmer, I’m a hotel investor, don’t you know. ’ He laughed loudly. ‘It’s pure psychology. When half the village has signed up the rest won’t be able to stand the thought of their neighbours buying themselves Audis and calling themselves hotel owners and not being a part of it themselves. Better to risk losing a few kroner, so long as your neighbour does the same.’

I nodded slowly. He’d probably got the psychology about right there.

‘The project is solid. The tricky bit is to get the train rolling.’ Carl kicked at the ground beneath us. ‘Get the first few to commit, people who can show the others they think the project’s attractive enough to want to be a part of. If we manage that, then everyone will want to climb on board and then the thing will be rolling along under its own steam.’

‘OK. And how are you going to persuade the first to come on board?’

‘When I can’t even manage to convince my own brother, you mean?’ He smiled that fine, open smile with the slightly sad eyes. ‘One’ll do,’ said Carl before I could respond.

‘And that one is…?’

‘The bellwether. Aas.’

Of course. The old council chairman. Mari’s father. He’d been calling meetings to order for more than twenty years, run this solidly Labour commune with a firm hand through good times and bad until one day he’d decided that was enough. Aas had to be over seventy by now and busied himself mostly at home on the farm, although now and then he would write something in the local newspaper, the Os Daily , and people read what he wrote. And even those who didn’t agree with Aas to begin with would start looking at things in a new light. Light shed through the old chairman’s way with words, his wisdom and his undeniable knack of always making the right decisions. People really did believe that the plans for a national highway bypassing the village would never have seen the light of day if Aas had still been chairman, that he would have explained to them how this would ruin everything, deprive the village of the extra income the through-traffic brought them, wipe an entire local community off the map and turn it into a deserted ghost town with just a few subsidised farmers close to retiring age still clinging on. And someone had suggested that Aas – and not the current chairman – lead a delegation to the capital to talk some sense into the transport minister.

I spat. Which, for your information, is the opposite of the good ole boy’s slow nodding of the head and means that you do not agree.

‘So you think Aas is just dying to risk his farm and his land on a spa hotel high up on top of the bare mountain? That he wants to put his fate in the hands of the guy who cheated on his daughter and then ran off abroad?’

Carl shook his head. ‘You don’t get it. Aas liked me, Roy. I wasn’t just his future son-in-law, I was the son he never had.’

‘ Everybody liked you, Carl. But when you screw her best friend…’

Carl gave me a warning look and I lowered my voice and checked that Shannon – who was squatting in the heather and studying something – was out of earshot.

‘…then you slip a few places down the hit parade.’

‘Aas never knew about what happened between me and Grete,’ said Carl. ‘All he knows is that his daughter dumped me.’

‘Oh?’ I said in disbelief. And then a little less disbelieving once I thought about it. Mari – always very conscious of appearances – had naturally preferred the official version of her break-up with the village heart-throb, this being that she had dumped him, the unspoken assumption being that she was aiming higher than the mountain farm boy Opgard.

‘Straight after Mari broke up with me, I was summoned by Aas, and he told me how disappointed he was,’ said Carl. ‘He wondered if me and Mari couldn’t make up again somehow. Told me how him and his wife had been through some rough patches too, but they’d stuck it out now for over forty years. I said I would like that too, but right now I needed to get away for a while. He said he understood and gave me a few suggestions. My exam results at school were good, Mari had told him, and maybe he could arrange for a scholarship to a university in the States.’

‘Minnesota? Was that Aas?’

‘He had some contacts with the Norwegian–American Society there.’

‘You never mentioned that.’

Carl shrugged. ‘I was embarrassed. I’d been unfaithful to his daughter and now I was letting him help me in all good faith. But I think he had his reasons, he probably hoped I’d return with a university degree and win back the princess and half the kingdom, like the boy in the fairy story.’

‘So now you want him to help you again?’

‘Not me,’ said Carl. ‘The village.’

‘Naturally. The village. And exactly when was it you started having these heart-warming thoughts about the village?’

‘And just exactly when did you become so cold-hearted and cynical?’

I smiled. I could have told him the date and the hour.

Carl took a deep breath. ‘Something happens to you when you’re sitting on the other side of the world and wondering who you really are. Where you come from. What context you belong to. Who your people are.’

‘So you’ve discovered that these are your people?’ I nodded in the direction of the village a thousand metres beneath us.

‘For good and ill, yes. It’s like an inheritance you can’t give away. It comes back to you, whether you want it to or not.’

‘Is that why you’ve dropped your accent? You turning against your own culture?’

‘No way. This is Mum’s culture.’

‘She talked city talk because she spent so long working as a housekeeper, not because it was her own dialect.’

‘Then put it this way: our heritage is her adaptability. There are a lot of Norwegians in Minnesota, and I was taken more seriously, especially by potential investors, when I spoke naicely .’ He said it through his nose, the way Mum spoke, and with an exaggeratedly posh accent. We laughed.

‘I’ll be back talking in the old way soon enough,’ said Carl. ‘I’m from Os. But even more from Opgard. My real people, Roy – above all, that’s you . If the national highway is routed round the village and nothing else comes along that turns the village into a place to come to then your service station—’

‘It isn’t my station, Carl, I just work there. I can run a service station anywhere, the company has five hundred of them, so you’ve no need to be rescuing me.’

‘I owe you.’

‘I said, I don’t need anything—’

‘Oh yes, you need something. What you really fucking need is to own your own service station.’

I shut my mouth. OK, so he’d hit the nail on the head there. He was my brother, after all. No one knew me better.

‘And with this project you’ll raise the capital you need, Roy. To buy a station here, or wherever.’

I’d been saving up. Saving every damn krone I didn’t need for food and electricity to warm up the king-size pizzas when I didn’t eat my dinner at the station, for petrol for the old Volvo, and to keep the house in a reasonable state of repair. I’d talked to head office about possibly taking over the station, signing a franchise contract. And they weren’t completely negative about it when they realised the main road and all the traffic with it would soon be gone. But the price hadn’t fallen as much as I had hoped it would, which was, paradoxically enough, my own fault, since we were quite simply doing too well.