Margit Sandemo - The Ice People 38 - Hidden Traces

There came his man ...

The Wanderer reached Berlin the day after the world heard the news, in all its horror.

German troops had moved into Prague; Czechoslovakia was no longer a free nation.

World War II threatened like a shadow on the horizon.

The Wanderer followed Tengel the Evil’s tracks to a sports stadium in Berlin. There they were so clear that the Wanderer had never known anything like it. He was dumbfounded.

But now the situation was grave: Tengel the Evil had managed to hide himself completely. He had vanished without a trace.

The possibilities were extremely frightening.

Chapter 2

Vetle Volden’s three children had each turned out differently. In 1939, Mari was seventeen, Jonathan fifteen and Karine thirteen. On the surface, all three seemed well adjusted. But this was because all three, especially the two girls, were good at hiding their thoughts and emotions.

Mari, the older of the two girls, was the more outgoing.

She had cursed her name a thousand times. “Malin and Mali,” she would fume. “Marit and Mari. Don’t the Ice People have any imagination? Nobody knows who you’re talking about, they have to try and remember who Mari is. I’m me, and I’m a very important person in this context.”

“Yes, in your context,” Jonathan would answer, because they teased each other incessantly.

Mari had a compulsion to avoid unpleasantness. She wanted to be liked by all, and for everyone to like one another. Above all, she hated it when people were cross and grumpy. Listening to people quarrelling made her feel sick, and to be told that somebody disliked her was unbearable. She couldn’t stand listening to suffering of any kind, and siding with one party in a dispute would have been unthinkable: it would mean the other party would be cross with her.

No one could live like that. But Mari tried.

This was why she was considered superficial and giggly; she laughed at everything, often in the wrong places, and she tried to smooth over any signs of annoyance or enmity among her school friends as soon as she detected them. If that wasn’t possible, she would run away with a cheerful joke.

Mari wanted to be friends with everybody. This was why she was almost excessively generous; she gave and gave all that she had. She was honest and would never have stolen from her parents, though she could be sloppy about returning the change she got when she had been shopping for her mother. It was never on purpose, she just forgot. All the change she got she used to buy sweets for her friends.

She had many friends but no best friend. She was the clown and daredevil of her class but not somebody you had a serious conversation with.

Mari resembled her French mother in her appearance and lively movements and had Vetle’s happy disposition. She was dark, with brown eyes in a narrow, personable face, which you remembered once you had seen her. It couldn’t be denied that she had lots of fun with boys, because a cheerful and unrestrained girl will always be popular. The boys were too immature to understand her helpless, desperate struggle to be liked.

Up to 1939, she had managed to fall in love seriously and for ever after at least twenty times. Her infatuations died down just as quickly and madly as they had arisen.

Jonathan, who was a tease, couldn’t help noticing Mari’s fast lifestyle. “Honestly!” he would say lightly. “They say that our branch of the family is destined to populate the earth, and Mum and Dad did a good job having three children. So you must also do your duty. Just get started having children! I think you’re making a real effort!”

At which Mari would throw a pillow at him. But his words stung. She felt that Jonathan was cross with her, which he mustn’t be! Was her reputation really so bad that it had reached her own brother?

Mari went to her room in despair. She had just met a boy who was the one, he really was. She knew he was! (Just like all the previous ones, but Mari had forgotten about them.)

What was she to do? She needed to be told that she had a friend, which she desperately needed, and she would have one now, she was sure of it! But if people were gossiping, she couldn’t ...

What was she to do? She had to meet him. The boy was a pupil like herself but he went to a different school. So Mari would haunt the places where he walked; she was totally absorbed, and the boy couldn’t help noticing her intense admiration.

It wasn’t good. Making oneself an easy target isn’t conducive to true love. This boy was used to everyone from little girls to grown women admiring and falling in love with him. He was slightly disgusted by Mari’s eager and far too obvious attempts. From what he gathered from the gossip among the boys, she was sweet and cheerful and superficial and easy. So why not? She was surely worth an evening or two, and that would be it. He would take what he wanted of her and afterwards she wouldn’t be interesting anymore.

So he got a friend to arrange the meeting. Once they had got to know one another, he could always invite her to the cinema one evening. The cinema ... etcetera.

Mari was thrilled. He had looked at her, spoken to her. He had said “Hi” in his husky voice, kind of casually, as if he wanted to conceal his interest.

“Hi!” Was there a more beautiful word in the whole world? Hi ... Mari sampled the word all the way home from the café where she had been introduced to the boy; she copied his tone of voice and tried to adopt the same harsh, matter-of-fact facial expression.

Now they knew one another.

Oh, wonderful future!

Mari had no idea what awaited her at home.

Karine, the youngest of Vetle’s three children, was a dreamer, and she was hiding more serious secrets than Mari’s yearning for solidarity and togetherness with other people. With her eyes focused on an invisible spot in the distance, she walked about the streets or in the hills around the town, often talking to herself, inventing fantasies and daydreams. Admittedly, she missed somebody she could talk to about all these things, but so far she hadn’t found anyone who could glide into her private world and share it with her. That was asking a lot – which is why writers, poets and dreamers are the loneliest creatures in the world.

Karine didn’t want to live in the real world. She was a true escaper, perpetually fleeing from the present and reality. Apart from the fact that she had such a tendency, there were other reasons as well.

Shocking things had happened to her. So shocking that she would probably never regain her mental equilibrium. She was as maimed as anybody could be. The Ice People would have been horrified if they had known about it. But Karine wasn’t going to tell them.

She had been ten years old when the first unfortunate incident occurred. As she had always lived in her fantasy world rather than in the real world, she knew very little about people and their behaviour.

She was out cycling one beautiful spring evening. The air was dusky blue with a golden light after sunset. The road lay free and tempting before her. In a small forest glade she knew, there ought to be cowslips and violets in bloom by now. She wanted to see if that was the case. Perhaps she might also see a pasqueflower?

She came to a more deserted area where little houses still glowed red, with old apple trees and gnarled cherry trees round about them. It was pristine countryside, a remnant of a time that was disappearing.

A man cycled up to her on the road. That is to say, he had actually passed her without her noticing it and had then turned around.

To Karine’s young eyes the man was pretty old, though he wasn’t yet thirty. She didn’t know him. Karine might not be very pretty – she wasn’t a beauty like Mari – but she was physically mature for her age and was developing curves that could clearly be seen under her too-tight sweater.