Janne Drangsholt - The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter

“I’m not going into the cage,” I said.

She laughed briefly and sat down on the bench behind the table, along with Pretty Putin and Ivan.

Ingvill, Peter, and I sat down at the long table in silence. And waited. Well, Ingvill typed something into her phone. It seemed like she’d had Internet access most of the time. Either that or she was playing Candy Crush.

A few moments later a strange procession of people turned up. First a whole bevy of secretaries, carrying stacks of paper and folders and writing implements. After that came the dean and five other men I thought I’d seen on Ivan’s tour, but whom I couldn’t quite place. I was very sure that one of them was the custodian, who seemed to keep turning up in the university’s numerous rooms and lecture halls the day we’d taken our tour. Although today for some unknown reason he was wearing a suit. Stalin style. Maybe this was actually his day off, but he’d been called in for jury duty?

My head was pounding. I thought about the cough syrup, which was sitting on my nightstand. I thought about Sunny von Bülow. If your name was Sunny von Bülow and you could strut around wearing Chanel, an opiate addiction wasn’t so bad, but for the rest of the world’s population it was just ugly and pathetic. I shouldn’t have taken so much, and I certainly shouldn’t have called Bjørnar.

Suddenly I thought about the cough-syrup lady from the open house. What if she had actually been a future version of myself, who had been sent back in time to warn me of my boozy, drug-dependent future? Sent back to the very beginning, to the moment when I made the wrong choice.

I tried to tell myself that I was standing in a golden forest and ahead of me there were two paths. Two paths that diverged. Sometimes there was a right path and a wrong path, one that was overgrown and narrow and one that was wide open, but from where I stood, it was hard to see which one led where.

The question was only if I’d already made my choice.

If the path was buying the house.

If the path was the cough syrup.

If the path was the art heist.

If I was still standing in the forest, contemplating the paths.

The pounding in my head and the cold, clammy feeling increased and were amplified by the custodian, who had taken a seat in the judge’s chair and was now slapping the table in front of him repeatedly with the palm of his hand. Weirdly enough it seemed like the people up front were goofing around, because they were all smiling and laughing, and the four other men joined in on the playful banter as well. They seemed like they were about to whip out a tray of smoked trout and vodka and have a party.

But the gaiety did not extend to Ivan, Irina, or Pretty Putin. When I turned around, I saw that they were all sitting stone-faced, staring straight ahead.

This was very clearly psychological warfare. And when was the university president actually going to arrive?

Suddenly I understood the game plan. Of course! He wasn’t coming. The only one coming was the so-called janitor who was clearly KGB and whom Pretty Putin, Ivan, and Irina had no doubt been reporting our movements to for ages. And now he would sit as judge in this ridiculous courtroom, which was probably used as a law-school lecture hall, but which could also be used for real if someone played punk-rock music in a church or stole a priceless artifact or something.

I closed my eyes, put my head in my hands, and prepared to have a panic attack of epic proportions. But it didn’t happen. The seconds ticked by, but to my surprise I wasn’t predominantly scared. Actually, I was still angry. More importantly, I felt no need to contemplate this any further or gauge whether it was some kind of side effect of the cough syrup that had caused me to walk around giggling and seeing fairies. Instead I had the overwhelming sense of having had enough.

And the next instant, I was standing up and slapping the table as hard as I could with my hand. So hard, actually, that I was worried I might have broken something. But the anger deadened the pain.

“Enough!” I shouted. “ Enough already! I can’t take any more! Are we bad guests who didn’t bring hostess gifts? Yes. Are we clueless about what you consider the fundamental ground rules of politeness? Yes. Was this committee put together without any consideration for whether its members actually knew anything about internationalization mechanisms or bilateral cooperative agreements between public universities? Yes. Are we here primarily because we’re scared of being reassigned to the preschool-teacher education program and/or because we’re trying to get each other reassigned? Yes. Did we somehow misinterpret the gesture of being shown a valuable icon? YES!”

No one had interrupted me yet, so I took a breath and continued.

“But we’re all human beings. Look at us!” I flung my arms out to the sides in a dramatic gesture meant to also include the custodian and all his secretaries. “What is the question that we must all ask ourselves? The question is…”

I paused, trying to think up a good question.

“Is it worth it? Or, to put it another way, should we be—or not be? Am I right? For what is it that makes us bear those evils we have, instead of flying to others that we know not of? The heartache and the thousand natural shocks. That we all endure.”

As I enunciated the final sentence, I made another sweeping gesture to include the custodian and everyone else in the room, but the former merely watched me calmly with his dark eyes, his expression unchanging.

Still, there was no turning back now. So I kept going.

“Omnes mundum facimus,” I said slowly. “We all make the world. For there are ravens out there. They swoop down and ravage the land. But we aren’t ravens! We’re falcons! And when the falcon cannot hear the falconer, we’re all in big trouble. That’s when the indignant desert birds swoop down. That’s when darkness falls. But we are falcons and we will not let darkness fall. We all make the world.”

There was silence. For a long time.

For just as long as I’d spoken. And that was a long time, for a speech that didn’t consist of a single point beyond a few fragments ripped from Hamlet’s soliloquy, Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” and what I remembered from Prince Igor .

In the end the custodian walked over to the secretary who had been simultaneously interpreting my speech and mumbled something into her ear.

“Would you like to say anything else?” she asked me as she continued to jot down everything that was said in her notepad.

“Just that Norway and Russia have never been at war,” I said. “And you can’t say that about very many countries. We’re a team. In a way.”

I put my hand on my heart the same way the dean had done a few days earlier.

“Friendship,” I said loudly.

She translated yet again for the KGB custodian, who rolled his eyes and said three brief words in return.

Silence again.

“Isn’t she going to translate?” Peter whispered to me.

I wanted to say that she didn’t need to.

Because it was obvious what he’d said.

I glanced over at the cage and gulped.

So this was how it ended. No dignity and no hope. I should have known.

I bowed my head and prepared for the sword blow.

But then the silence was broken by applause. And the next moment the custodian was next to the whole useless Norwegian delegation, hugging and kissing Ingvill, Peter, and me, as he let out a long stream of words that the secretary struggled to interpret quickly enough.

She abridged it to, “He says that you have an agreement.”

“An agreement?” I asked, confused.

“A cooperation agreement,” she said with a stiff smile. “Congratulations. This has never happened before.”