Margit Sandemo - The Ice People 34 - The Woman on the Beach

“That is what she told my cousin.”

“But if you look in the court records, you’ll see that she was born in 1880.”

André took a closer look. “Yes, indeed! So she must have been nineteen. She was dying, so she might have spoken indistinctly. Or might not have been quite clear in the head. Yes, I agree with you. I thought that it was a bit much that a seventeen-year-old could already have two children. Thank you for your observation. There was something else I noticed in the records: at the hearing, somebody, a relative perhaps, spoke of a missing locket that had belonged to Petra. They couldn’t find it anywhere.”

“That’s interesting,” the lady said. “Although a locket can easily get lost.”

“What a shame. It might tell us a thing or two,” said André. He realized that he had said “us”. He blushed and asked the lady for the address of the orphanage, which she gave him. Then he thanked her for her assistance and left the building.

He had time to pay another visit that day, so of course he decided to visit the home of Petra’s parents in Bakklandet.

As he walked through the streets of Trondheim and crossed the bridge – he wasn’t sure that his car would be able to get through these narrow streets – he remembered that Silje had been here many centuries ago: lonely, scared, frozen and destitute. At the same time, Charlotte Meiden had been out with her newborn baby. On that very night, Silje had also met Tengel and the child Sol and Heming the Bailiffkiller.

What a strange night that must have been!

It was the night of destiny, when the foundation was laid for the new family that fought for good instead of playing Tengel the Evil’s game. André wondered what Silje and the others would have thought if they had known what had happened to the Ice People since then. All their varying fates ...

Tengel the Good knew ...

But it was many years since he had last appeared. Since Lucifer had entered the picture, the ancestors had passed on the responsibility for the Ice People to the descendants of the black angel: Marco, and now Imre.

Marco had said that they collaborated with the ancestors. Tengel the Good knew about everything that was going on. André felt a twinge of pain in his heart at the thought of Marco, because he missed him dreadfully. But Marco wouldn’t show himself anymore. He must be pretty old by now, surely? Imre, who was fair and gentle, had taken his place. He had appeared only once at Linden Avenue, standing in the doorway one frosty morning with the infant Christa in his arms. Since then, they hadn’t heard from him.

But then, life flowed quietly for them all now. They didn’t need supernatural assistance.

André had arrived in a miserable slum, and he winced. Was this where Petra’s father ...? It wasn’t. As he walked on, small but fairly well-kept houses replaced the hovels, and he found the right address. He took a few deep breaths before he lifted the door knocker.

He could hear children playing in the courtyard inside. The game abated. Then eager feet came running and the gate was opened with some difficulty.

Four or five children stared at him. They weren’t terribly clean, and their noses needed wiping.

“Hello,” said André politely. “Does a man by the name of Ola or Ole live here?”

Their stares became more intense.

A door into the courtyard opened and a woman’s voice shouted: “What is it, children? Who’s there?”

Hesitantly, they let André in through the gate and he made his way to the door where the woman was standing, with her hair sticking up and a pail in her hand.

André repeated his request.

“Ola? There’s no Ola here,” the woman said dismissively. “Or Ole.”

“Has anybody by that name ever lived here?”

The woman wrinkled her brow. She was remarkably skinny and poor, but made it a point of honour to keep the place looking nice and clean. “Yes,” she replied, matter-of-factly, “but it was a long time ago.”

André did some swift arithmetic. When might Petra’s father have thrown her out? In 1899 she was seventeen – no, nineteen. If she had her first child a few years before that? Well, for heaven’s sake, what had they been thinking? Surely a seventeen-year-old couldn’t have had two children by then. Of course, it was possible but then she would have been fifteen the first time. And the child would have been conceived when she was fourteen. No, that sounded grotesque. Of course, Petra was nineteen when she and Vanja met one another!

Anyway, now he had arrived at a year. “That must have been around 1897,” he said.

The woman pondered. “Yes, that makes sense. A man by the name of Ole Knudsen lived here, but that was before my time,”

“Where ... is he now?”

“He’s dead.”

Damn, André thought, but aloud he said: “What about his family?”

“I don’t know. Wait a moment.”

In a shrill voice, she shouted into the house: “Mother, did Ole Knudsen have any relatives?”

An indistinct, squeaky reply came from inside the house. The woman in the doorway translated: “My mother says he had a daughter. But she got into trouble.”

Well, thank you, thought André, I know that. “Was she an only child?”

A new question into the house. The reply came promptly. The woman turned to André: “Mother says that he had a son as well, but he died of strangles.”

André thought that was something only horses got.

“As a grown-up?”

There was yet another exchange between the door and the inner room. “No the poor boy was probably only sixteen at the time.”

André didn’t dare to ask whether Ole Knudsen had any siblings. His informant seemed to be getting slightly annoyed. Instead he fished out his purse and gave her some money for the “invaluable information”, as he called it. Now he could ask more questions because now the woman appeared more willing to cooperate. He had something to work on, so he asked permission to come back again if he needed to know more. She said he was welcome to do so.

The children, who had been hanging around him, ran as fast as they could to be the first to open the gate and let him out. He found some small coins and gave one to each of them. He was bound to be popular in that yard.

That was all he had time for that day. He went back to his hotel, working out a list of what he had found out and what he ought to do the following day.

Nette Mikalsrud unlocked the door to her small apartment. As usual, she registered the old-fashioned atmosphere inside. This was where she and her mother had lived for the past thirty years. Now her mother was dead and Nette lived there on her own.

She was actually called Antonette, but she detested that name. So when people had begun to call her Nette when she was a child, she had accepted the nickname gratefully.

She had been a beautiful and much-loved child. But when her father died, her mother had clung on to her only daughter, killing all her romantic dreams about young men going down on their knees to her.

The family’s financial situation had been dire. Something had to be done, and Nette resolutely applied for a lowly job as a messenger with the local council. Of course, her mother had been almost hysterical: young women from good families didn’t work, and definitely not in such a miserable job. What was the mother to do while Nette was out all day?

The housework, the girl had replied bluntly. Somebody had to do it. But it had always been Nette who did that, hadn’t it? Well, perhaps her mother would like to earn the money and get a job herself? Oh, no, the older woman was shocked. What a thought!

As time went by, things began to work out for the two women. Nette was efficient and clever, and there were opportunities for a young woman to do more important things than running errands and making coffee for the council staff. She got a better job, and her mother was thrilled with the money she earned.