Lene Kaaberbol: Death of a Nightingale

The old guy looked back just as she bent down to pick up the top cobble. She smiled at him. Or tried to, at least.

“I’m just …”

He was two steps away, but the younger one was closer, and she hit him , hard and fast and without thinking. She felt the impact shoot up through the stone and into her hand and closed her eyes for an instant. She knew that the young cop fell in front of the old one, blocking his way, because she could hear them both curse and scrabble in the soap-like slush. But she didn’t see it.

She just ran.

Nina woke slowly, with some kind of murky nightmare rumbling at the bottom of her consciousness. There had been a refugee camp that looked like Dadaab, the flies and the heat and that smell you never completely escape from, the stench of atomized human misery. But the children lying before her on the ground with starved faces and protruding bellies were Anton and Ida.

She rolled over onto her side and tried to escape the dream. 9:02, announced the large digital wall clock that had been the first thing she hung on the wall when she moved in. An anemic February sun was streaming unimpeded through the window; the shades she had bought at IKEA on a rushed afternoon in August were still lying in their packaging on the radiator almost six months later. Luckily, there were no neighbors. Outside lay Grøndals Parkvej, and on the other side of it the park and the railroad embankment, the reason she had bought the apartment. Centrally located yet still a quiet neighborhood, the realtor had said, a really good parental buy—did she have a son or daughter starting college, perhaps? When he had realized that she was going to be living there herself, he had adjusted expectations noticeably. Divorced mothers were difficult clients, it seemed, confused and unrealistic and with no perspective on their own budget.

The cell phone rang. It must be what had woken her, even though she hadn’t really registered it, since it wasn’t her ringtone. She poked Magnus in the ribs.

“It’s yours,” she said.

A groggy sound emanated from the fallen Swedish giant. He lay on his stomach, his head buried so deep in the pillow, it was amazing that he could breathe. His broad, naked shoulders were covered with short golden hair, and he smelled of semidigested beer. She nudged him again.

Finally, he lifted his head.

“Oh, my God,” he said in his distinct Swedish accent. “What time is it?”

“It’s Saturday,” she said, since that was more to the point.

He reached for the cell phone, which was lying on the floor next to the bed along with his wallet and keys. Neat little bedside tables, his and hers, were not part of the apartment’s inventory. The only place where she had made an effort was in Anton’s and Ida’s rooms, and they still hadn’t turned out right. Everything was too tidy. It lacked the clutter of toys and discarded clothing, the scratches on the wall from hockey sticks and lightsabers, the remnants of stickers that wouldn’t quite come off, odd splotches from overturned soda cans and soap bubble experiments. Quite simply, it lacked children. She hadn’t managed to make it more than a temporary refuge. Home was still the apartment in Fejøgade, and that was where they had their life.

She got up and headed for the bathroom. A small bathtub that permitted only sit-up baths, yellowing white tiles from the ’50s, and if you insisted on having a washing machine in there, you had to accept that you were going to bang your knees against it every time you sat on the toilet. But to sit in a Laundromat at an ungodly hour to have clean clothes for the next day … No, thank you. “Been there, done that,” as Ida would have said.

After peeing, Nina gargled with chlorhexidine. She was susceptible to thrush and other mouth infections after her attack of radiation illness the year before. All in all, her resistance was not what it had been, she noted dryly. Otherwise Magnus probably wouldn’t be lying in her bed now. The doctor and the nurse. Damn. How much more clichéd could you get?

He had just been through a divorce. So had she. They were both consenting adults and all that. But she knew perfectly well that it wasn’t because they were adults. It was because they were both so unbearably lonely that any kind of intimacy was better than nothing.

Through the bathroom door she could hear his voice change from Saturday grogginess to professional clarity, and a rush of alarm raced through her. She spat out the petroleum-blue mouthwash into the sink, plucked yesterday’s T-shirt from the dirty laundry basket and pulled it on, then opened the door.

He was getting dressed, the cell phone still pressed to his ear.

“Okay,” he said. “No, don’t give her any more. I’m on my way.”

“Is it Rina?” she asked with an odd kind of pseudomaternal instinct. There were around 200 females at the Coal-House Camp, yet Rina was the first one she thought of.

“They’ve given her several doses of Bricanyl,” he said. “But they can still hear crackling on auscultation, and she’s hyperventilating.”

Sweet Jesus, it was Rina.

“What happened?”

“Everything,” he said. “Come on.”

Natasha had ended up on the wrong side of the lake, and there was only one way to deal with that. She had to get hold of a car.

The realization had been gnawing at her since the previous evening, or rather the previous night, because at that point it had been almost 2 A.M., and even if she had dared take a train or bus, they weren’t running any longer, at least not to where she was going.

She had been so tired that her bones hurt. In particular her knees and the small of her back ached from the many freezing kilometers, and she knew that she couldn’t walk much farther without resting.

Most of the houses on the quiet street lay dark and closed behind the snowy hedges. But she could hear music and party noises and beery shouts, and when she got to the next street corner, she saw three young men peeing into a hedge outside a whitewashed house that was alight with boozy festivities. She stopped, half sheltered by the fence of the corner lot, leaning for a moment against the cold tar-black planks.

“Laa, la-laa, la-laa …” roared one of the peeing men, loudly and in no key known to man. “Laa, la-aa, la-laaa … Come on!”

The two others joined in, which didn’t make it any more tuneful.

“We are the champions, my friend …”

She realized that they were celebrating some kind of sports victory. Presumably basketball—she suddenly saw how alike they were physically: broad shouldered, yes, but primarily tall, and younger than she had thought at first; she had been fooled by their height.

Yet another young boy emerged from the house. He seemed more low-key than his peeing buddies, just as tall but a little skinnier, a little more awkward. His dark hair looked damp and spiky, and he wore glasses. A girl tottered after him in high heels she could barely manage, the strap of her pink blouse falling halfway off one shoulder.

“Robbie, don’t go yet!” she shouted shrilly.

“I need to get home,” he said.

“Why? Dammit, Robbie … You can’t just … Robbie, come onnnn!”

One of the three at the hedge quickly zipped up and tried with similarly incoherent arguments to convince Robbie to stay, but he shook them off.

“I’ll see you guys,” he said and started walking with long, fairly controlled steps down the street in the direction of Natasha. The girl stood looking after him, her arms folded across her chest.

“Robbie,” she wailed, but one of the guys by the hedge put an arm around her and pulled her along with him back into the house. Robbie continued down the sidewalk as if he hadn’t heard her.