Ю Несбё - Blood on Snow

While I was sitting there immersed in happy thoughts, Corina Hoffmann walked into the living room from the bedroom, and everything changed.

The light.

The temperature.

The calculations.

That afternoon I didn’t go to the supermarket.

I didn’t wait for Maria the way I sometimes did, I didn’t follow her to the underground at a safe distance, I didn’t stand right behind her in the crowd in the middle of the train, where she always liked to stand even if there were empty seats. That afternoon I didn’t stand there like a madman, whispering things to her that only I could hear.

That afternoon I sat bewitched in a darkened room, staring at the woman on the other side of the street. Corina Hoffmann. I could say whatever I wanted, as loudly as I wanted — there was no one to hear me. And I didn’t have to look at her from behind, look at her hair so hard that I managed to see a beauty in it that wasn’t actually there.

Tightrope-walker. That was the first thing I thought when Corina Hoffmann walked into the room. She was wearing a white terry-cloth dressing gown, and she moved like a cat. By that I don’t mean that she ambled along like some mammals do, cats and camels, for instance. Moving both legs on one side before moving the others. Or so I’ve heard. What I mean is that cats — if I’ve got this right — walk on tiptoe, and that they put their back paws on the same spot as their front paws. That was what Corina was doing. Setting her naked feet down with her ankles straight, and putting the second foot down close to the first. Like a tightrope-walker.

Everything about Corina Hoffmann was beautiful. Her face, with its high cheekbones, Brigitte Bardot lips, her blonde, mussed-up, glossy hair. The long, thin arms emerging from the wide sleeves of the dressing gown, the tops of her breasts, so soft that they moved as she walked and when she breathed. And the white, white skin of her arms, face, breasts, legs — bloody hell, it was like snow glittering in sunlight, the way that can make a man snow-blind in just a few hours. Basically, I liked everything about Corina Hoffmann. Everything except her surname.

It looked like she was bored. She drank coffee. Talked on the phone. Leafed through a magazine, but ignored the newspapers. She disappeared into the bathroom, then came out again, still wearing the dressing gown. She put a record on, and danced along to it rather half-heartedly. Swing, it looked like. She had something to eat. Looked at the time. Almost six. She changed into a dress, fixed her hair and put a different record on. I opened the window and tried to hear, but there was too much traffic. So I picked up the binoculars again and tried to focus on the record-sleeve that she’d left on the table. It looked like there was a picture of the composer on the front. Antonio Lucio Vivaldi? Who knows? The point is that the woman Daniel Hoffmann came home to at quarter past six was a completely different one from the woman I had spent the whole day with.

They skirted around each other. Didn’t touch each other. Didn’t talk to each other. Like two electrons pushing away from each other because they’re both negatively charged. But they ended up behind the same bedroom door.

I went to bed, but couldn’t sleep.

What is it that makes us realise we’re going to die? What is it that happens on the day when we acknowledge it isn’t just a possibility, but an unavoidable fucking fact that our life will come to an end? Obviously everyone will have different reasons, but for me it was watching my father die. Seeing how banal and physical it was, like a fly hitting a windscreen. What’s actually more interesting is: What is it — once we’ve reached that realisation — that makes us doubt again? Is it because we’ve gotten smarter? Like that philosopher — David Something-or-other — who wrote that just because something keeps happening, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to happen again. Without logical proof, we don’t know that history is going to repeat itself. Or is it because we get older and more scared the closer it gets? Or is it something else entirely? As if one day we see something that we didn’t know existed. Feel something that we didn’t know we could feel. Hear a hollow sound when we bang on the wall, and realise that there might be another room behind it. And a hope is sparked, a terrible, draining hope that gnaws away at you and can’t be ignored. A hope that there might be an escape route from death, a short cut to a place you didn’t know about. That there is a point. That there is a narrative.

The next morning I got up at the same time as Daniel Hoffmann. It was still pitch-black when he left. He didn’t know I was here. Didn’t want to know, as he’d been careful to point out.

So I turned off the light, sat in the chair by the window and settled down to wait for Corina. I took out my papers again and looked through my letter project. The words were more incomprehensible than usual, and the few I did understand suddenly seemed irrelevant and dead. Why didn’t I just throw the whole lot away? Because I’d spent so long composing those wretched sentences? I put it all down and studied the lack of activity on Oslo’s deserted winter streets until she finally appeared.

The day passed much like the previous one. She went out for a while and I followed her. From following Maria I had learned the best way to do it without being noticed. Corina bought a scarf in a shop, drank coffee with someone who seemed to be a girl friend to judge from their body language, and then went home.

It was still only ten o’clock, and I made myself a cup of coffee. I watched her lying on the chaise longue in the middle of the room. She’d put a dress on, a different one. The fabric shifted around her body whenever she moved. A chaise longue is a strange piece of furniture, neither one thing nor the other. When she moved to find a more comfortable position it happened slowly, elaborately, consciously. As if she knew she was being watched. Knew that she was desired. She looked at the time, leafed through her magazine, the same as the day before. Then she tensed up, almost imperceptibly.

I couldn’t hear the doorbell.

She stood up, went over to the door in that languid, soft, feline way, and opened it.

He was dark-haired, fairly thin, the same age as her.

He went in, shut the door behind him, hung up his coat and kicked off his shoes in a way that suggested this wasn’t his first visit. Nor his second visit. There was no doubt about that. There had never been any doubt. So why had I doubted? Because I wanted to?

He hit her.

I was so shocked at first I thought I’d seen wrong. But then he did it again. Slapped her hard across the face with the flat of his hand. I could see from her mouth that she was screaming.

He took hold of her throat with one hand and pulled her dress off with the other.

There, under the chandelier, her naked skin was so white that it seemed to be a single surface, no contours, just an impenetrable whiteness, like snow in the flat light of an overcast or foggy day.

He took her on the chaise longue. Stood there at the foot of it with his trousers round his ankles while she lay on the pale, embroidered images of virginal, idealised European woodland landscapes. He was skinny. I could see his muscles moving under his ribcage. The muscles in his buttocks tensed and relaxed like a pump. He was shuddering and shaking, as if he were furious that he couldn’t do anything... more. She lay there, legs open, passive, like a corpse. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Seeing them like that reminded me of something. But I couldn’t work out what.

Maybe I remembered what it was that night, once everything had calmed down. Either way, I dreamed about a picture I’d seen in a book when I was a boy. Animal Kingdom 1: Mammals, from the Deichman Library. It was a picture of the Serengeti savannah in Tanzania, somewhere like that. Three furious, scrawny, wound-up hyenas that had either managed to bring down their own prey, or had chased the lions away from theirs. Two of them, their buttocks tensed, had their jaws dug into the zebra’s gaping stomach. The third was looking at the camera. Its head was smeared with blood and it was baring its jagged row of teeth. But it was the look in its eyes I remembered most. The look that those yellow eyes were directing into the camera and out of the page of the book. It was a warning. This isn’t yours, it’s ours. Get lost. Or we’ll kill you too.